AIDS Scourge in Africa Shows Urgent Need for New Womens Agency:
UN Envoy
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New York, Mar 17 2006 6:00PM
Lesotho and Swaziland are gasping for survival amidst the
HIV/AIDS pandemic, the United Nations special envoy for the dis-
ease in Africa said today, repeating his call for setting up an
international womens agency to deal with the discrimination
that has allowed the global scourge to ravage the continent.
Briefing reporters in New York on his trip last month to both
countries, Stephen Lewis, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annans Spe-
cial Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, said it was impossible to
traverse the continent of Africa...without an enveloping sense
of horror and despair at the carnage amongst women.
Describing himself as frantic over the slow response to the
devastation, Mr. Lewis said: Things are changing on the ground
so incrementally Lesotho and Swaziland are but symbols for the
greater whole that were losing millions of young women in Af-
rica. In the process, were creating a generation of orphans
whose lives are lives of torment.
Swaziland continues to have the highest prevalence rate in the
world at 42.6 per cent. In its recent antenatal survey of preg-
nant women between the ages of 25 and 29, the prevalence rate
was 56.3 per cent, Mr. Lewis said. Thats the highest preva-
lence I have ever seen registered in any age group anywhere. The
mind fractures at the thought of it.
Mr. Lewis said that such a terrifying HIV prevalence rate
among this age group of pregnant women was a stark reminder of
the meaning of gender inequality, adding that these and simi-
lar grim statistics gave rise in both countries to an overwhelm-
ing deluge of orphans.
He decried the legacy of inequality which drives the virus and
leads to the devastation of the women and girls of the conti-
nent calling it an omnibus catalogue of womens vulnerability:
rape and sexual violence, including marital rape; domestic vio-
lence.
An impassioned Mr. Lewis declared that if there was a powerful
international force for women, we would not be in this galling
predicament, if there was an international agency for women.
He called for an agency on the scale of the UN Childrens Fund
(UNICEF), arguing that while the current agencies dealing with
womens affairs including the UN Development Fund for Women
(UNIFEM) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) were performing
well, a larger organization was needed.
What we now have in place whether its UNFPA or UNIFEM or the
Division for the Advancement of Women cannot do the job that
needs to be done. This is not to disparage their good work; this
is only to say that it has to be combined and then enhanced a
hundred-fold.
However, he warned that the United Nations doesnt seem to un-
derstand this truth, citing as evidence the recent appointment
of a 15-person high-level panel examining the issues of develop-
ment, humanitarian assistance and the environment which now has
only two female members.
Decrying this ratio, he urged efforts to expand the panels mem-
bership, and to have absolute transparency in its proceedings,
adding that it must also be open for submissions from womens
groups.