Restrictive funding, emphasis on abstinence hinder $15 billion effort.
In this investigation
Key findings
- A year-long investigation of President Bush’s initiative to fight AIDS abroad finds that conservative ideology hinders its real benefits by insisting on abstinence-only programs over promoting condom use.
- In 2003, President George W. Bush asked Congress to appropriate $15 billion for an international AIDS initiative, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) — a plan that, while seeking to treat those infected with HIV/AIDS and prevent the spread of the disease, is hindered by conservative ideologies.
- ICIJ found that PEPFAR actually restricts the use of funds because of its ties to faith-based organizations that promote abstinence-only programs and overlook the importance of other courses of action such as condom use.
About this investigation
A year-long investigation into how rigid rules and restrictions of President Bush's initiative to fight HIV/AIDS have affected countries struggling with the pandemic.
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SOUTH AFRICA: In South Africa, some AIDS funds go to faith-based groups with little expertise.
NIGERIA: Nigeria has been slow to respond to the HIV threat, and may be understating the epidemic’s reach.
KENYA: Complicated funding forms in Kenya beyond the reach of illiterate caregivers.
KENYA: Treatment’s cost and stigma force some Kenyans to take their chances.
HAITI: Dr. Catherine Maternowska is an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco in the departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and Anthropology, History and Social Medicine.
HAITI: Jean-Saurel Beajour is the founder of the Haitian-based Association of National Solidarity for People Living with HIV-AIDS (ASON), Haiti’s first AIDS community advocacy group.
INDIA: Insistence on condoms keeps HIV under control in India but clashes with U.S. funding restrictions.
Divine Intervention
With few resources, a church named Redemption takes on poverty, hunger and other staggering causes in Haiti
HAITI: The Cité de Dieu community is one of many that have fallen off the radar screens of governmental and nongovernmental organization programs. The one organization still helping to feed the community is a neighborhood church named Redemption.
Divine Intervention
U.S. non-profit organizations’ efforts to improve conditions in Haiti encounter complications
HAITI: Project Medishare is one of many U.S. organizations working on improving the health of this community, where between 5 and 10 percent of the population is infected with HIV.
Divine Intervention
Modern health care groups collaborate with voodoo priests to help identify the HIV-positive
HAITI: Bresa Belizaire works out of a wood hut with a raked-dirt floor. Under a wooden chair in the corner are bottles of medicine and human bones. Belizaire is a voodoo priest, or “houngan” in Creole, in Thomonde, Haiti, an impoverished area in the center of the country.
HAITI: Dieula sits in a circle of women on the tiled floor of a dimly lit room here, discussing the sexual violence that makes HIV infection an ever-present danger for Haitian women.
ETHIOPIA: Tatiana Shoumilina is an adviser for UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, in Ethiopia. She says HIV programs won’t work unless they combine a sense of urgency with long-term planning.
Divine Intervention
‘The most important thing I’ve learned is the importance of being abstinent and to be faithful’
ETHIOPIA: Sixteen-year-old Yeshiwork Gashaw lives with her mother in Ethiopia’s remote northeastern Amhara region. When interviewed she was taking an HIV prevention course taught by Food for the Hungry, an Arizona-based relief organization that received an $8.3 million President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) grant to teach abstinence and fidelity to young people.
ETHIOPIA: Atnafu Betseha, 32, is an Ethiopian Orthodox priest at the holy water site of St. Mary’s Church. His job is to administer the water and pray for the healing of the more than 700 pilgrims that arrive here every day.
ETHIOPIA: “During the day I am a member of the association and at night I am a commercial sex worker in the streets. I am not sure how old I am, but I think I am around 27,” says Tigist Salomon.
ETHIOPIA: Michot Sebresilassei, 20, an HIV-positive woman from Eritrea, drinks holy water every morning to wash down the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) provided by the U.S. government through the local hospital.
Divine Intervention
‘Telling people to be abstinent is like telling somebody to put his hands in the fire’
ETHIOPIA: Mengistu Asnake is the deputy country representative in Ethiopia for Pathfinder International, a Boston-based charity that supports family planning and reproductive health services in the developing world.
ETHIOPIA: An estimated 130,000 adults and children died of AIDS in Ethiopia in 2005 alone. But others are surviving with the help of antiretroviral drugs — a therapy that fights the HIV virus — that they get through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
ETHIOPIA: Hotels along the Djibouti corridor, Ethiopia’s main trade route to the Red Sea, are lately undertaking an unexpected and disturbing role as hospices for commercial sex workers infected with HIV/AIDS.
Four U.S. agencies rate effectiveness higher than PEPFAR.
Click on the above link (centralfunds.xls) to download a list of centrally awarded and managed funds by the U.S. Agency for International…
In the course of the investigative reporting for the Divine Intervention project, the Center for Public Integrity sued the U.S. State Department on behalf of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to gain access to funding information for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Once again, ideology trumps good science and public health policy as Bush’s global AIDS plan ignores reality and endangers women’s lives.
Critics say FDA approval rule has meant greater use of high-cost drugs at expense of helping fewer patients.
From Abstinence to the WHO: Here are some common acronyms and terms in the Divine Intervention project.
The government program is funded entirely with public money. It has nothing to do with national security. And it appears to spotlight the Bush administration’s “compassionate conservative” profile. It would seem, in other words, to be just the kind of program officials would gladly share with journalists.
A year-long investigation into how rigid rules and restrictions of President Bush’s initiative to fight HIV/AIDS have affected countries struggling with the pandemic.
Restrictive funding, emphasis on abstinence hinder $15 billion effort.
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