HIV/Aids treatment is available to all because of international and government funding, writes JODY CLARKEin Lusaka
FIVE YEARS ago, Lilian Nkhata couldn’t get out of bed. A mother of six, she felt tired all the time, unable to eat or move because of the debilitating effect that HIV/Aids was having on her body.
“But since starting on ARVs in 2005 life is back to normal. I put on weight and was able to go back to work,” said the schoolteacher, who has been receiving treatment at the Chikuni Mission hospital three hours west of Lusaka, which has been run by the Irish Sisters of Charity since 1948.
“Life has really changed for the better and the stigma has gone. People don’t look at you as if you are an outcast anymore.”
Thanks to adequate funding from the international community and the Zambian government, HIV/Aids treatment is available to all in Zambia.
Back in the early 1980s “people were dropping like flies” from the disease, said Fr Phil Baxter, a Capuchin missionary from Co Leitrim.
Today, the infection rate has dropped from 21 per cent in 2001 to 14 per cent, freeing up hospital space, allowing people to go back to work and putting the country well on track to meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of stopping the spread of the disease by 2015.
In fact, as the UN meets in New York this week to discuss progress towards the eight MDGs, Zambia is one of the major success stories.
Two years ago, the UN Development Programme announced that Zambia would meet all but one MDG, that being the one on the environment.
On the target of providing universal primary education, net enrolment at primary schools has increased from 80 per cent in 1990 to 97 per cent in 2006 while the maternal mortality rate has dropped from a high of 729 deaths in every 100,000 live births recorded in 2000 to 591.
The prevalence of underweight children has also fallen, from 22 per cent in 1991 to 14.6 per cent in 2007, meaning the country should meet the goal of halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger in five years’ time.
An economy that has grown at 6 per cent a year for a decade on the back of rising copper prices has helped, but a government budget that has been “progressively pro-poor” has been a significant driver, says the Irish ambassador to Zambia, Tony Cotter. “There has been a progressive decline in poverty rates as the government has allocated more money into education and health,” he said.
However, the picture is less rosy elsewhere in the world.
A lack of political will from the governments of some poorer nations means that many countries are nowhere near meeting the goals set down by the UN a decade ago.
In Nigeria, the sixth biggest oil producer in the world, gross inequality in the provision of education means that 8.2 million children don’t attend primary school, with many more dropping out within the first year, says Oxfam. The country has the highest number of children out of school in the world, with more than half of these in the north of the country. Girls suffer the most, with many receiving just six months of education in their lives.
The global financial crisis hasn’t helped either, with less than half the £32 billion (€37.7 billion) of increased aid promised by developed nations at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit being delivered, with Italy, Spain, Greece falling back on their promises.
In Ireland, the Government has committed to contributing 0.7 per cent of GDP to overseas aid by 2012, but thanks to swingeing budget cuts last year, the figure now stands at 0.52 per cent.
That hasn’t helped efforts to halve the number of the world’s hungry, which now stands at 925 million people, up from 830 million a decade ago.
Meanwhile, on current trends the world will miss the sanitation target by half a billion people, with 2.6 billion people still living without access to a toilet.
But the Chikuni Mission hospital, part-funded through the Irish missionary development organisation Misean Cara, makes it clear that progress on the MDGs is possible. In 2006, the overall mortality rate at the hospital was 5.5 per cent, said Dr Claudia Caracciolo, the doctor in charge.
Now it is 2.2 per cent, “helped in large part”, she says, by the drop in the HIV rate. “In 2005 and 2006 we were full . . . But now people know how to prevent the disease. Our nurses go on the radio and educate the community and the stigma around it has disappeared. From a high of 22 per cent, 10 to 12 per cent now have HIV/Aids in the area.”