FAITH groups are essential to the global AIDS response, which is currently at a crossroads between success and failure, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has warned.
Its report, The Urgency of Now: AIDS at a crossroads, was published at an event in Munich on Monday.
International solidarity, investment in health care, equal access to services and advancing technologies, removing harmful and discriminatory legislation, and tackling social stigma, are all key to the global target of ending HIV by 2030, it says. This commitment was enshrined within the Sustainable Development Goals.
Overall, new HIV infections and related deaths are declining towards the 2025 target of 250,000: fewer people acquired HIV in 2023 than at any point since the late 1980s. Almost 31 million people were receiving lifesaving antiretroviral therapy in 2023, “a public health success that has reduced the numbers of AIDS-related deaths to their lowest level since the peak in 2004”, the report says.
But progress, it warns, has been “highly uneven”. While in sub-Saharan Africa there was a rebound in average life expectancy from 56.3 years in 2010 to 61.1 years in 2023, the numbers of people acquiring HIV are higher in 28 other countries, some of which have experienced epidemics.
“The global AIDS response is at a crossroads,” the report says. Success or failure will be determined by whether world leaders give “effort and urgency . . . to accelerate prevention and break down the barriers that keep people, especially marginalized people, from both HIV prevention and treatment services”.
Faith groups have been pivotal in addressing the key issues and campaigning for change, particularly in the lowest-income countries.
“Religious leaders and faith communities can challenge societal norms, attitudes, and practices that perpetuate inequalities, such as sexual and gender-based violence or stigma and discrimination,” the report says.
It finds that faith-based organisations deliver 30 to 70 per cent of all health care services in in some African countries, and therefore have a “wide reach and influence”. Stigma and discrimination, a significant barrier to eliminating AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, is especially harmful in these settings.
In 15 of the 19 countries that reported data in the past five years to UNAIDS, more than ten per cent of people who injected drugs said that they had avoided accessing health-care services due to stigma and discrimination in the past 12 months, the report says.
In Nigeria, interfaith work with young people who are living with HIV is helping to fight this. The Framework for Dialogue has been developed by the International Network of Religious Leaders Living with or Affected by HIV, UNAIDS, and the World Council of Churches (WCC).
The Revd Dr Evans Onyemara, a Methodist minister and Secretary of the Christian Council of Nigeria, said: “What stood out was the interfaith approach of including Muslims. To come together to sit down and talk is not too common among us. But we are now together to discuss a common problem and deal with it.”
Understanding between the two faiths is essential for social progress, the report says.
“Christianity teaches morality and peaceful coexistence between the two faiths, just as Islam does,” Abubakar Sadiq from Jama’atu Nasril Islam, an advocacy organisation for Muslim youth, said. “We mostly believed that people who are living with HIV were sinners. My thoughts about HIV were completely redefined.”
Elizabeth Oluchi, a young woman living with HIV who is a human rights advocate, said that faith leaders were essential to this conversation. “They’ve been reaching out to people in their communities and faith-based organisations, churches, religious leaders, even traditional rulers. Because every child grows up in a church or a religious setting, we need to start from our religious places.”
Gracia Ross, from the WCC, said: “We need to be reminded that changing HIV stigma is not something you can achieve in one activity. Changing stigma is an ongoing process that needs long-term investment.”
Speaking via a video link at the launch event on Monday, the Archbishop of Cape Town, Dr Thabo Makgoba, said that the path to victory was well-marked. Five urgent actions were needed, he said.
First: “Don’t cut aid; boost aid.” Second, “Drop the debt,” which, he said, was “choking the countries of the global South, making it impossible to invest the money required for health and education”. Third and fourth, “share medicines” and “support communities; they know best.” And, finally, he said: “Reject hate; choose love.”
This would mean addressing laws attacking marginalised communities, but also dealing with those who respond to them with “hateful hearts”— including churches.