News from the Field

An international conference seeking to ease the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa (International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa: ICASA) being held this week in Senegal has attracted an estimated 5,000 delegates from around the world, including a large contingent from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

According to senior adviser Tomohiko Sugishita, JICA has been involved since 2000 in global efforts to combat the problem, paying increasing attention to Africa. He outlined in the Senegalese capital of Dakar that the agency's main contribution was helping to strengthen health systems in individual countries by training personnel, improving administrative systems at local and national levels and participating in projects such as monitoring and evaluation of programs.

The agency has worked in more than 40 developing countries, participated in some 26 programs and projects and dispatched, in addition to regular staff and experts, some 250 volunteers (JOCV) specifically to work in the field of HIV/AIDS.

Several JICA presentations at the Dec. 3-7 meeting outlined the situation in Senegal itself and noted that while young people found it difficult to access voluntary counseling and testing centers in regular health centers, they were much more likely to attend similar facilities in youth centers. Eight of these so-called VCT centers were established in youth facilities and by early 2006 the number of young people attending was 2.7 times higher than in health facilities. HIV testing has continued to grow strongly in such centers despite the end of donor assistance.

The next step, according to one paper, is to ensure sustainability of these youth facilities and gradually expand the model throughout the country and other nations.

Young people, particularly the poorly educated, should be specifically targeted for help and the goals of abstinence and fidelity should be encouraged, it said.

Another presentation insisted that the quality of service, and particularly of confidentiality for prospective patients, had to be improved, including through a system known as Kaizen which was developed in Japan in the 1950s to improve the performance of such companies as Toyota. Effectively, it works on the so-called 5S principles -- sort, set, shine, standardize and sustain to improve the overall performance of any system.

This was also introduced in the eight youth centers in Senegal with positive results, though the presentation emphasized that the quality of leadership of the chief official in each location was paramount.

According to U.N. statistics, some 6,000 persons a day continue to die from HIV/AIDS in Africa, the world's worst affected region. More than 11 million children have been orphaned by the disease and an estimated 22 million people are living with HIV/AIDS today throughout the continent.