Background
HIV currently infects more than 40 million people worldwide, the vast majority of whom live in Africa. AIDS has already killed around 30 million people, and an estimated 30 million people now die from the disease every year. As Hunter (2003: 21) notes, ‘this is 8,200 per day, almost three times the number who died in the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001’. Decision and policy makers globally as well as in Africa can only conceive of and implement an appropriate response to AIDS once they have a clear sense of what the impact of the epidemic will be - where it will strike, how the epidemic will be fanned across the continent, and which socio-political structures make Africa such a virulent Petri-dish for the dissemination of the virus.
In March 2003, UNAIDS launched a scenario-building project to explore the impact that HIV/AIDS might have in Africa over the next 20 years. The central aim of the project was to assist the African HIV/AIDS community in combating the unfolding epidemic, and to inform policy decisions in particular. The launch of the project was preceded by over a year of planning and coordination among its initiating partners. In addition to the UNAIDS secretariat, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the African Development Bank (ADB) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) took institutional ownership of the project, contributed to the project budget, and representatives of these organizations served on its steering committee. Importantly, the experience of UNAIDS in combating the global AIDS epidemic was combined with Royal Dutch/Shell’s expertise and more than 30 years’ experience in developing scenarios and futures methodologies. The Global Business Environment (GBE) division within Shell offered their scenario skills and services free of charge, donated some office space at Shell Centre in London for the duration of the project, and (along with UNAIDS) assumed directorship of the project.The codirection and institutional cooperation between UNAIDS and Shell created a novel and ambitious private-public partnership.
A key aim of the project was to identify and bring together ‘remarkable people’ (Van der Heijden,1996: x) who could comprise the core participant group. It was essential to bring together a broad spectrum of people who would be representative of the ‘African HIV/AIDS world’ - policy makers, politicians, bureaucrats, civil society representatives, activists, exponents of the private sector as well as organized labour, proponents of the biomedical community, and so on. In the end, around 60 individuals were included as the project’s primary participants. These individuals would take ownership of the project, attend the three important workshops that would determine the entire project, build the rough scenarios and, finally, affirm and then champion the final product. In addition to the core participant group, a list of around 40 remarkable individuals were identified for pre-workshop interviews - this second group of HIV/AIDS stakeholders were important in setting the scene and informing the larger workshop process.
In short, this UNAIDS project brought together a great variety of people working in particular roles to create a shared understanding of a complex epidemic and its possible future impacts. Africans, Europeans and North-Americans from different disciplines, cultures and experiences, using different assumptions and often working towards different goals, were all involved. However, a simple breakdown of the players and their responsibilities includes:
Initiating partners from the international organizations who backed the project with their finances and prestige;
Workshop participants from the African HIV/AIDS world, including activists, medical personnel, and so on;
Pre-workshop interviewees;
Researchers who assembled statistics, facts and research papers to stimulate thinking and back up ideas and also served on the project support team;
Project support team of writers, researchers, workshop facilitators and managers working under the direction of a UNAIDS and Shell partnership.
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