According to Wikipedia: “In Uganda, awareness of AIDS is demonstrated to be over 99 per cent and more than three in five Ugandans can cite two or more preventative practices. Youths are also delaying the age at which sexual intercourse first occurs.” Pointing to a 100 per cent condoms approach as the solution in urbanized Western areas does not necessarily mean that the same approach will work everywhere, and indeed, is as indicative of a colonial mindset as anything else. If you can point me to an implementation of an AIDS-reduction strategy that has been more successful in an African nation than the ABC program, I will be happy to re-appraise my views. —James E. Cann
Dear James,
Uganda began having success in handling their HIV/AIDS crisis in the ’90s using an ABC-style model (though it wasn’t called that), but many people contend that it was an equally mindful focus on all three aspects of the plan, along with president Yoweri Museveni’s “multi-sectoral” strategy that really curbed their infection rates.
The strategy involved educating the public about AIDS, offering voluntary HIV tests and counselling, and giving clear prevention methods including the use of condoms. Then along came Bush with his PEPFAR policies, something that worked out beautifully with Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni’s conversion to born-again Christianity. Suddenly pro-condom billboards were being replaced with chastity slogans and Janet Museveni was leading virginity parades through Kampala, proclaiming condoms ineffective, trying to conduct a census to count all the virgins and running for a seat in parliament because God told her to.
So yes, James, I’m afraid I’m going to stick to my contention that these decisions are (currently anyway) being dictated by irrational religious beliefs. “With funding coming in now for any youth activities,” reads a quote by a Ugandan teen outreach worker from the Human Rights Watch report The Less They Know the Better, “if you talk about abstinence in your proposal, you will get the money. Everybody knows that.”
The U.S. government literally hijacked (with the blessing of an evangelical First Lady) Uganda’s earlier success, claiming their own version of ABC as the real victor. From a brief by Human Rights Watch: “Since 2003, we have watched as the Ugandan government downplays its own proven track record in an obvious attempt to please international donors such as the United States. We have watched as our own leaders rewrite history and misleadingly attribute reduced HIV prevalence to adoption of sexual abstinence. We have watched as the U.S. government pours millions of dollars into HIV-prevention programs that provide misleading information about the effectiveness of condoms and that fail to equip people—particularly women—with the essential skills needed to negotiate safer sex.”
Many organizations that do HIV/AIDS outreach also teach the option of abstinence, but they don’t do it by deriding others. Zimbabwe is one country where rates are dropping— using what looks like a model similar to the one formerly applied in Uganda. As for the distribution of condoms being an indication of a colonial mindset, cultures around the world have used barrier methods for thousands of years and in fact, the first recorded use of condoms is in an African country—Egypt. Though we may all have difficulty practising safer sex at times, shouldn’t people be given the option without moral judgement?
I urge you to download The Less They Know the Better at www.hrw.org. I love Wikipedia too, but there’s a reason why, as Stacy Schiff reported in a recent New Yorker article, the entire House of Representatives has been banned from it several times: “Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse,” Schif wrote. The page you quote from is in need of a serious update because guess what? Evidence presented at AIDS 2006 suggests that rates are once again rising in Uganda.
