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Something remarkable happened in Uganda. Not long ago, while neighboring African nations were reeling from the effects of crippling and ever-increasing AIDS rates, Uganda managed to do the impossible. They turned their rates around.
As Uganda’s AIDS rates fell from nearly 15 percent of the population in 1990 to a much-improved 8 percent by the beginning of 2000, the country’s success story began to offer a light at the end of the ever-darkening AIDS tunnel. But then something went horribly wrong. After years of progress, the rates began to climb back up. What happened?
Well, the United States stepped in.
By implementing campaigns that had already proven ineffective in its own country, the US managed to undo all the incredible work that Uganda’s AIDS campaigns had done. The name of the new campaign? Abstinence
Prior to U.S. involvement, Uganda had it covered. They were doing what other African nations had failed to do; namely, they had gotten people to talk about sex. People in Africa like to have sex but they don’t like to talk about it; in fact, it’s an almost taboo subject. That makes it awfully difficult to battle a disease that is transmitted chiefly through sex, and has led to some wild misconceptions. In South Africa, former president Thabo Mbeki even went so far at to inform his people that AIDS was actually a disease not of sex, but of poverty.
But Uganda managed to sidestep those misconceptions by facing the issue head on with campaigns such as ABC (abstinence/be faithful/use a condom) and “Zero Grazing,” which encouraged people to have only one sex partner at a time. And these campaigns were working. People were talking.
But the U.S. had something to say about that. Unhappy with the way funds were being spent in the HIV/AIDS campaign, the U.S. decided instead to invest their money in evangelical, faith-based campaigns that would promote abstinence rather than safe sex, and earmarked $1 billion to be spent on abstinence campaigns. Soon, the only way for African countries to get any funding for AIDS campaigns and prevention was to adhere to an abstinence policy.
Low and behold, the policy didn’t work. AIDS rates continued to climb and even Uganda, the African little engine that could, began to chug its way up the AIDS rate ladder.
The lesson of this tale is that Western solutions clearly don’t work everywhere (and in the case of abstinence, no where). Uganda was doing great, but when the U.S. stepped in and decided that they were doing it wrong, the whole fight went to pieces.
Imagine what could have happened had that $1 billion gone to campaigns that were already in place, already working. Imagine what could have happened in Africa if those campaigns and their messages had spread across the continent. Had that happened, we might be one step closer to imagining an AIDS-less Africa.