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.
What sort of work will Aids-Free World be doing on Aids and the legal system?
There's nothing quite like it other than the Aids Law Project in South Africa. We're using a lot of pro-bono firms in the United States and we have a professor of law who is overseeing it, who will be taking cases for us, really intervening to give support to African lawyers and activists who want to pursue through the courts cases of discrimination and injustice which flow from HIV/Aids. We're very excited about that because it's a dimension that's not readily available around the world.
What is unique about the publication created by Aids-Free World?
It's called The State of the World's Response to Aids. We're getting a number of celebrated fiction and non-fiction writers to write about Aids in a critical way, taking on issues of delinquency and negligence in various parts of the world and giving it a profile it wouldn't otherwise have.
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I think that through Aids-Free World, as it is now designed, the voice will be heard. We will be principled and uncompromising. We're not going to share this tendency to mollify everybody. We're going to be very strong and tough in our own positions while being respectful in the process and I'm very excited about it.
More than 20 years on, how would you describe the toll that AIDS has exacted in Africa?
I would describe it as apocalyptic, not only in terms of the numbers, which is like a nightmare for the high prevalence countries on the continent, but in terms of the consequences, which are going to linger for generations.
We're going to have whole occupational groups - doctors, nurses, pharmacists, farmers, civil servants – that have been ransacked by the virus so that we will constantly be training and retraining and replenishing and trying to find additional people.
We'll have millions upon millions of orphaned children who feel bewildered and the whole anchor of their little lives lost. We'll have generations of new parents who have no experience in parenting because they've been orphans their entire lives bringing up children.
We'll have a very significant diminution of productivity in some parts of the private sector. We'll have the tremendous cost of sickness and death, which will plague societies for years to come.
