One for my mum

This one goes to my mum! Yeah right - are you wondering how it all links to G8.

Well, it happens to be her birthday on Friday, the exact date of the first official meeting of the G7 Finance Ministers. This will take place in Essen while I will be enjoying myself on some holiday out of the country, for sure far enough away from Essen! But I managed to tick off crucial bits and pieces of my to-do-list and ActionAid will launch a report addressing the upcoming meeting. Big on the to-do-list of the Finance Ministers is hopefully to commit to a proper funding plan for the target of universal access to prevention, treatment and care of HIV/AIDS by 2010. The G8 leaders have promised to do so already back in 2005 - so far all talk but no action. It seems, that political decision makers want to ensure us with more talk that all promises will be kept, albeit we see no action...yet again the G8 agenda headline "growth and responsibility" is ringing an alarm bell (if only in my ears) that the G8 wants to hand over the responsibility of fighting HIV onto developing countries. However, in 2007 alone 10 billion are lacking to fight HIV/AIDS! Someone in Germany would dare to say it is peanuts (sorry for an insider)- for developing countries it is not; for people living with AIDS it is not.

With establishing the Global Fund it sounds like G8 has fulfilled its obligation and the call is thus for African countries to come up with appropriate health budget, strengthening health systems, formulation of comprehensive anti-AIDS strategies, and development of strategies to overcome the scarcity of professional staff in the health sector. As if those strategies don’t yet exist; as if those nurses and health personal are not dying of HIV; as if the health budget is not cut due to IMF economic conditionalities...