Fund hits back at loveLife

Posted to the web on: 05 January 2006
Fund hits back at loveLife’s charges
Tamar Kahn
Science and Health Editor

CAPE TOWN — The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria hit back at loveLife yesterday, denying that its decision to cut funding to the AIDS-awareness group had anything to do with “US-led right wing ideology”.
This followed loveLife CEO David Harrison’s accusation on Tuesday that the fund’s board had bowed to international political trends in refusing to supply loveLife with the $56m allocated to the programme as the second phase of a $68m grant.
“The issue was the programme’s ability to reduce HIV infection among young people,” said Global Fund spokesman Jon Lidén. 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.
SA has more than 5-million people living with HIV, more than any other country in the world.
The Global Fund was convinced of loveLife’s ability to provide young people with sex information, and improve sexual and reproductive health, but these were activities beyond the scope of its brief, said Lidén.
The Global Fund aimed to stem the spread of HIV and needed evidence that loveLife’s programmes were achieving this if it were to provide money, he said.
Details of last month’s board meeting, at which the Global Fund finally pulled the plug on loveLife’s funding, would be published on the Global Fund’s website early next month, Lidén said.
LoveLife launched in 1999, with a provocative media campaign designed, it said, to get young people talking about sex and HIV/AIDS. Its programmes target young people aged between 12 and 17, and include teenage-friendly clinics and school-based programmes such as the “loveLife games”.
According to research commissioned by loveLife, more than 85% of SA’s young people aged between 15 and 25 were aware of loveLife, and more than 3-million people had participated in its programmes — including reading its publication S’camto.
The study, conducted by the Reproductive Health Research Unit, found just more than 10% of 15 to 24 year olds were infected with HIV; HIV prevalence was much higher among young women (15,5%) than men (4,8%).