allAfrica.com: Africa: New Advocacy Group Vows Tough Stance on HIV/Aids (Page 1 of 2)

Stephen Lewis is a renowned Canadian diplomat who has worked extensively to reduce the impact of HIV/Aids in Africa and to advocate for those living with the disease. An experienced UN diplomat, he was former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa.

He currently is chairman of the board of the Canada-based Stephen Lewis Foundation, which endeavors to ease the pain of HIV/Aids in Africa by funding grassroots projects. Lewis is also co-director of Aids-Free World, a new international Aids advocacy organization based in the United States.

In a wide-ranging interview with AllAfrica's Cindy Shiner, Lewis discussed current efforts to fight HIV/Aids and how Africans are coping.

Tell us about your experience working in Africa.

My feeling about Africa has never changed in almost 50 years of going back and forth. It's a continent of tremendous sophistication, intelligence and generosity of spirit at the grassroots, particularly amongst the women.

If the international community had cared, had rallied more urgently, and earlier, we could have avoided millions of deaths because the continent is one of great strength and if it had the support it could have galvanized to turn things around. So while the role of the [Stephen Lewis] foundation is important and supportive, it's merely an adjunct to the tremendous strength in Africa itself.

Tell us about Aids-Free World.

It's a new organization created by my co-director, Paula Donovan. What we've done is tried to reassemble and enlarge the team that worked with me in my former envoy role. Collectively we're fighting for those issues that were important at the time and continue to be important now.

We're focused entirely on advocacy, in five main areas: the creation of an international agency for women, sexual violence, particularly in the [Democratic Republic of] Congo, Aids and disabilities, Aids and the law and the production of a very unorthodox publication.

All of the work that we do will be Africa-driven. But we will engage in the advocacy on behalf of Africans or in concert with Africans in Africa.

We understand that the women's agency that you mention has been recommended to the United Nations.

We're fighting for it tooth-and-nail and we believe in it profoundly. We believe if the agency is created it can be a tremendous force in the lives of women in all of these health-related areas – not just Aids but in female genital mutilation, in sexual trafficking, in the consequences of early marriage, maternal mortality, in all aspects of health.

The agency would focus on the entire range of women's priorities, from political representation to economic income, to health education, social issues, everything that women are engaged in and struggling for. It would be the primary vehicle to… combat gender inequality, which is so profoundly destroying the lives of women around the world. It will play a very real role in HIV/Aids and in preventing infection and securing the lives of women.

So the new agency would be in addition to women's agencies that are already part of the United Nations?

There are these small entities that deal with women's issues - Unifem and the Division on the Advancement of Women and the Office of the Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women - but they have never had the money or the mandate to make a significant impact internationally and no one has ever taken them seriously.

That's why we need something entirely new, funded at an exponential increase in money, starting with a billion dollars a year with an under-secretary-general with strength and capacity on the ground. These [small entities] can be rolled into the new agency but they can't be converted into the new agency.

[The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)] we see as an important and singular agency that focuses on sexual and reproductive health. One would wish to give it more money; it should not lose its separate authenticity.

How will Aids-Free World address the sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

We're taking a very tough position on the failure of the international community to intervene to protect women and to help restore their lives after they have been so brutalized, and we have worked very closely with Eve Ensler and V-Day, the NGO that sprang out of the Vagina Monologues.

Aids and disabilities is not something that one hears of often.

There's been a tremendous lack of focus on disabled persons with Aids: persons blind, deaf, physically disabled, developmentally handicapped. We have two excellent young women in Uganda at the moment working on a design, a model, which can be used in other countries for the intersection of disabilities and Aids.

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