2006 - loveLife's funding cut

Media should analyse loveLife’s funding cut
The Global Fund’s recent decision to pull the plug on a $56-million grant to the loveLife campaign has renewed questions over the effect the campaign is having on South Africa’s youth.“The issue was the programme’s ability to reduce HIV infection among young people,” Global Fund spokesperson Jon Liden told Business Day.
The Global Fund had given loveLife three opportunities last year to revise its proposals for phase-two funding. However, it had failed to convince the fund’s board that its programmes were having a direct effect on the spread of the disease, he said.
A wounded loveLife responded to the funding cut with a lengthy statement saying a Technical Review Panel appointed by the Global Fund Board had given their funding proposal the thumbs up. The only conclusion loveLife could draw, it appears, was that the decision was “probably more politically driven than anything else”, according to loveLife deputy CEO, Grace Matlhape.
CEO of LoveLife, David Harrison, said fundamentalists in Washington set on promoting abstinence-only campaigns were intent on scuppering his more broad-minded education programme.
“loveLife is a victim of international politics … squeezed between the ideological right and progressives,” he told Business Day.
He said similar things on 702’s late-afternoon drive-show on Wednesday, January 4.
Although loveLife conspiracy theories gained largely uncritical media attention in South Africa, the Global Fund remained unfazed in response.
“This is a Fund with limited resources … loveLife is extremely costly - there are programmes that have been very effective, which cost a fraction of what loveLife costs. It would be irresponsible of the Global Fund to spend almost $40 million without seeing results,” Global Fund spokesman Jon Liden told UN news agency IRIN PlusNews.
In a wide-ranging report on the loveLife campaign last year, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that loveLife (with a budget of about R200-million a year) had failed its 1999 mission to cut HIV incidence by half by 2004.
The infection rate does not appear to be dropping significantly. In fact, the latest results from tests at government health centers show that HIV rates for pregnant women younger than 20 have remained stagnant at about 15 percent, with rates for young adults age 20 to 24 hovering around 30 percent.
The Chronicle story also noted concerns over the rigour of loveLife’s research.
Just as troubling is evidence that loveLife may be misrepresenting data collected by the Reproductive Health Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the Medical Research Council of South Africa to bolster its cause, said Warren Parker, director of the Center for AIDS Development, Research and Evaluation in Johannesburg.
Harrison admitted there have been problems. “We have made a couple of glaring factual errors. … Some statistics were consistently misrepresented,” he said. “We didn’t have a good research team. We had a media team.”
Dr. Rachel Jewkes, director of the Gender and Health Group at South Africa ’s Medical Research Council and a frequent critic of loveLife, derides the campaign’s tactics. “What they claim is dishonest, and it is disreputable,” she said. “It is part of a pattern.”
In 2003, Parker criticised the programme for being selective with its facts.
This review of the programme’s approach points to a lack of rigour in the use of contemporary research findings, a dismissive and competitive approach to other South African HIV/AIDS interventions, and inadequacies in evaluative research.
Parker noted that loveLife brochures championing the programme often did not contain caveats. For instance, while loveLife brochures in 2002 and 2003 boasted that “ 69% say lovelife has caused them to abstain from sex or reduce their number of sexual partners”, they conveniently omitted “the finding that loveLife ‘caused’ 20% of respondents to have sex more often”. They also neglected to mention the limitations of their research methods when presenting their data, said Parker.
The 2005 South African National HIV Prevalence, HIV Incidence, Behaviour and Communication Survey found awareness of the loveLife brand second highest in the 15-24 age category, although the effect of the brand on HIV/AIDS decisions was not explored.
Perhaps the most damning evidence that general HIV/AIDS education in South Africa is not working came from a question in a survey asking respondents if they felt they were at risk of HIV infection. 66% percent believed they weren’t, including half of the respondents who were HIV positive.
“That means we have more than two million people walking the streets of South Africa who think they are not infected, which means they are probably infecting others,” the study’s principal investigator, Dr Olive Shisana, commented in an IRIN news report.
To what extent loveLife survives this latest blow remains to be seen. What we can hope for from the local media, though, is more careful analysis on the reasons behind the cut and the potential ramifications, rather than simply swallowing hook, line and sinker, Harrison’s argument that wealthy Christian fundamentalists who only want to preach abstinence are behind it. The fact is that we desperately need effective HIV/AIDS education campaigns in South Africa, and it is up to us to develop and grow these quickly. – Richard Frank