In Zimbabwe alone, more than 2,000 people die of AIDS each week. Although the disease is prevalent mostly in Africa, he points out that it is now spreading rapidly in the Asian sub-continent. Malloch Brown says that one of the biggest drawbacks is the unwillingness of people to come to terms with the disease - either because of social embarrassment or because of the sheer difficulty of confronting and dealing with it. On Oct. 23, the UNDP will honour four individuals, two of whom are HIV positive, for leading the fight against the disease in their own communities. The awards ceremony is an annual event organised by UNDP to mobilise worldwide support for the goal of poverty eradication.
International assistance is most effective when it is closely co- ordinated with such local efforts.
In Rwanda , a UNDP-supported 1 million dollar campaign is helping the government to strengthen or create community organisations, establish or nurture testing and counselling centres, and deal with HIV in the armed forces. In Malawi, UNDP has worked with the government to organise a donor roundtable which raised 110 million dollars of the 121 million dollars needed to implement an anti-AIDS plan. Malloch Brown admits that a shortage of funds has compounded the AIDS crisis. Financial support for UNDP's HIV-related activities, including cost sharing with the World Bank and other donors, has been about 300 million dollars to date. The lack of resources has been further aggravated by the fact that AIDS is spreading three times faster than the funding to control it.