How did South Africa do it?

Six years ago at the 14^th AIDS conference in Toronto, Stephen Lewis, the then UN special convoy on HIV and Africa accused South Africa of being criminal in dealing with HIV. At that time the president refused to admit that HIV caused AIDS. The minister of health advised people living with HIV to use garlic and olive oil to treat HIV!

This year South Africa is a proud country. The country managed to beak the taboo about HIV and is scaling up prevention and access to testing and treatment. South Africa is on track to have an HIV free generation by stopping mother to child transmission.

So what turned the South African tide? Activism in South Africa goes back to the early days of the epidemic. In 2001, the global access to treatment movement led by South African activists and people living with HIV won a court case against 39 pharmaceutical companies who wanted to use Intellectual Property to boost their profits and thus limiting access to medicines in South Africa.

Then the activists fought their own government and took it to court and won their case so that the government had to start providing services for pregnant women to stop mother to child transmission.

Subsequent government and president learnt the lessons, recognising that hiding their head in the sand would only fuel the epidemic. The government decided to focus on allocating more domestic resources into HIV programmes even if donors pull out.

The moral of the story is clear: you cannot hide AIDS in any country- the only way to end it in any country is a combination of activism and high level political commitment.