SENEGAL: Anti-AIDS campaigners march in Dakar, and demand world leaders deliver promised funds to fight the disease, despite the global financial crisis

Record ID: 402702

  • Title: SENEGAL: Anti-AIDS campaigners march in Dakar, and demand world leaders deliver promised funds to fight the disease, despite the global financial crisis
  • Date: 3rd December 2008
  • Summary: MORE OF CAMPAIGNERS PARADE (SOUNDBITE) (English) SPOKESPERSON FOR THE SAVE THE CHILDREN CHARITY VELEPHI RIBA, SAYING: ''With new government coming in, for instance in the U.S. like Barack Obama, in his presidential nomination......(unclear) pledge 50 million U.S. dollars over a period of 5 years to have been spent on HIV programs by 2013. We'd like that commitment to be m
  • Embargoed: 18th December 2008 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Senegal
  • Country: Senegal
  • Topics: Health
  • Reuters ID: LVA8VFTCGA5FKTTJNYGGQVDMGXEC
  • Story Text: Several hundred African anti-AIDS campaigners paraded giant puppets of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday (December 2) to demand that they deliver promised funds for plans to fight the disease.
    Waving some banners reading "African children are watching you" and others supporting AIDS victims, the demonstrators, most of them dressed in white, marched through a central avenue of the Senegalese capital Dakar. They included many children.
    Giant puppets, each nearly four metres high, represented Obama, clad in a blue jacket, red bow tie and red-and-white striped trousers, and Sarkozy, dressed in a black coat with a handkerchief in the French colours spilling from a top pocket.
    A big red and yellow spiky ball representing the AIDS virus was carried between them by marchers wearing white gloves.
    The campaigners, gathering on the eve of an international conference on AIDS in Dakar, said the demonstration aimed to remind the U.S. and French leaders not to forget their multi-million dollar commitments to anti-AIDS programmes.

    "With new government coming in, for instance in the U.S. like Barack Obama, in his presidential nomination......(unclear) pledge 50 million U.S. dollars over a period of 5 years to have been spent on HIV programs by 2013. We'd like that commitment to be met,'' said Velephi Riba, a spokesperson for the Save the Children charity which helped organise the march.
    Save the Children said that as governments in the rich developed world grappled with the global financial crisis and provided tens of billions of dollars for financial rescue packages, their leaders should not renege on public pledges to help the planet's poorest, including those suffering from AIDS.
    According to Save the Children, U.S. President-elect Obama had recently pledged to provide at least 50 billion U.S. dollars by 2013 for the global fight against HIV and AIDS.
    France, which currently holds the rotating European Union presidency, was a leading contributor to HIV-responding initiatives in Africa with funding of 360 million euros (458 million U.S. dollars) yearly.
    An estimated 33 million people worldwide were living with the HIV virus, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, at the end of 2007.
    AIDS has killed 25 million since being identified in 1981. An estimated
    7 million people become infected each year.
    The United Nations is warning that HIV infections could surge if countries pinched by the global financial crisis cut AIDS prevention programmes.
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