*EPF313 06/28/00
U.S. Peace Corps Unveils New HIV/AIDS Initiative for Africa
(Director Schneider launches program to help fight disease) (930)
By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The U.S. government is expanding its partnership with Africans to fight the killer disease HIV/AIDS by enlisting the help of the Peace Corps, whose thousands of volunteers have worked alongside Africans for decades to improve public health on the continent.
Director Mark Schneider, who announced the initiative here on June 27, said that the 2,400 volunteers already serving their two year tours in Africa will receive additional, special training "to assist the people of 25 African partner nations facing the HIV/AIDS pandemic."
The new program also will provide for the hiring and training of 2,400 more volunteers over the next three years to work on AIDS prevention and treatment projects on the continent -- and it will stress AIDS education in both urban and rural areas, he said.
Schneider said that "volunteers have worked side-by-side with their neighbors and communities, with their fellow teachers or health workers in every great campaign against disease" on the continent for years and the new AIDS program will build on that tradition.
"I traveled to Africa this spring and saw the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS," said Schneider, whose audience included volunteers bound for Mauritania, the most recent African nation to accept Peace Corps members. "I am convinced, not only by the statistical evidence, but by tragic stories of individual human beings, that this disease is the most serious humanitarian crisis facing the world today."
Schneider pointed to United Nations' statistics released this week in Geneva which reveal that more than 33 million people worldwide -- 23 million in Africa -- have been infected with the disease. Of the 13 million people who have died from AIDS the past 20 years, 11 million have been Africans.
In sub-Saharan Africa, Schneider said, the disease is "debilitating vast sectors of that region's economic and social infrastructure" by destroying the human workforce.
"According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), by the year 2020, the workforce of countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, and others will be as much as 20 percent smaller than they would have been without the AIDS crisis, even after the growth in populations were taken into account," he said.
Schneider said that the initiative, augmented by a $500,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will enable Peace Corps volunteers to "prepare better educational materials, conduct extensive training and promote broad-based community outreach efforts" in an attempt to combat the disease.
The initiative has three major parts, Schneider said, including:
-- a volunteer training component: "For some volunteers, working on HIV/AIDS will be their primary assignment in health. For others it will be integrated directly into their non-health sector work. The 2,400 volunteers already serving in Africa will be re-trained in AIDS education and prevention and will be given new materials, some in local African languages." Stress will be placed on strengthening institutions to cope with indirect victims of AIDS, such as orphans. Additional special training projects will be established in eastern and southern Africa, where the disease is most prevalent. For instance, 50 new volunteers will integrate AIDS "education components" in programs like a water and sanitation project starting in July in Kenya. Special volunteers also will arrive in Tanzania later this year to work with biology teachers in AIDS education programs for the classroom;
-- the integration of African teachers, health workers, school directors, non-governmental organization (NGO) leaders, small businessmen, labor leaders and women into the Peace Corps AIDS education programs: "In this way we will multiply, many times over, the voices and actions of thousands of people who are engaged in HIV/AIDS campaigns," Schneider said; and
-- drawing on the experience of the 59,000 Peace Corps volunteers who have served in Africa since 1961. A Crisis Corps established two years ago that allows returned volunteers to serve in Africa for limited periods of time, will be sending 200 persons to work up to six months on HIV/AIDS projects.
A guest at the ceremony, Sandra Thurman, director of the White House office of national AIDS policy, said "AIDS looms large" and is a threat to the plans and hopes envisioned in the Clinton administration's new U.S.--Africa partnership.
"With 11,000 new AIDS infections a day on the continent, the disease threatens to wipe out decades of hard-won economic progress," she explained. "So, the Peace Corps, as a development agency, is in a unique position to help Africans battle the disease with HIV education and prevention messages. AIDS is everybody's problem and everybody must be part of the solution."
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator J. Brady Anderson, U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania from 1994-97, pointed out that USAID gives the Peace Corps about $4 million a year to work on community development activities, including health programs.
Anderson, who recalled losing "a close friend, a Tanzanian, to this terrible disease," said he learned that "the best way to combat AIDS is at the community level and that is why I believe the Peace Corps is one of the best ways" to fight this disease.
Established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to help developing nations improve their economies through education and rural development programs, the Peace Corps now has 7,000 volunteers teaching English and science as well as working on health, environmental and small business projects in 94 countries.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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