19 July 2001
The President and members of the Board of the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen;
It is indeed a great pleasure for me to be present here today, in this occasion of the launch of the Y-Centre, an important project, not only for this region and province but also for the country as a whole.
Allow me also to welcome the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, together with the distinguished members of his Board at this auspicious occasion. We count the Foundation as one of our foremost partners in a number of social ventures, especially in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
In the Government that I have the privilege to represent, you have a resolute partner. We pursue our programme on HIV/AIDS from the acceptance that the menacing threat and daunting reality of this scourge has to be responded to with utmost decisiveness and determination.
We congratulate and praise the Kaiser Family Foundation for its signing last night, of a Memorandum of Intention with our Government, represented by the Minister of Health. That accord is to translate into a cost sharing public-private partnership exercise on the part of the two partners in support of Love Life HIV/AIDS prevention programmes amongst the South African youth.
It is a considerable undertaking that will see the Government investing R25 million per year over the next three years with the Kaiser Family Foundation providing an investment of R100 million per year over the same period of time.
The goals of the partnership that we have come to publicly announce and formalise this afternoon are articulated in the Memorandum of Intention as:
The conclusion of the process of concretising of our working partnership will take place in three months time from now when the two parties will sign a Memorandum of Agreement, giving legal and binding effect to the mutual commitment.
It is important that we all should recognise the fact that it was very deliberate that we chose this community of Mandeni and a Y-Centre as our venue for the public announcement of the Partnership between our Government and the Kaiser Family Foundation. We do so to highlight our serious concern about the scale and ferocity that HIV/AIDS is engulfing our rural communities and youth in those communities.
The concept of Y-Centres is creative in very far reaching way in helping the youth to mount their own defence against this plague that threatens to annihilate the economically active segment of our society and thereby obliterate all hope for economic success and social stability.
Dr Michael Sinclair of the Kaiser Family Foundation is well known to most if not all people concerned with HIV/AIDS in South Africa and he is much liked. He represents the Foundation - and the spirit of the global collective concern and joint endeavour to defeat the HIV/AIDS pandemic with excellent devotion and skill.
We value his efforts very highly. His impact on behalf of the Foundation can in part be seen in high level of visibility and tremendous success that the Love Life activities already have among the young people of our country as well as society in general. We are also aware that the Kaiser Family Foundation is involved in social and economic development work in ways that support the work on HIV/AIDS. An example of such activities is Kaiser's support of Ikageng Trust.
We see LoveLife as a hugely creative, rather daring and audacious -forceful youth-focused programme to raise high levels of awareness and discussion on the key aspects of HIV/AIDS with the aim of prevention. Love Life also has the capacity to change the attitudes and behaviour of the youth in ways that we are convinced will help to foster a culture of caring and support.
We wish for the force of LoveLife to find synergy with the sense of urgency and resolve that is emerging in the communities of our nation, especially in the rural areas.
Recently the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) held an advocacy workshop as this has been identified as one of our critical strategic priorities in the national fight against HIV/AIDS.
The output of that workshop was an advocacy programme that will add new impetus to activities that have formulated on - and are being run on the basis of our present HIV/AIDS strategic plan. SANAC will discuss the advocacy programme during its monthly meeting in August and see that it goes into implementation shortly thereafter. Love Life is seen as a particularly key partner as far as the advocacy programme is concerned - among other things.
This youth centre was launched only six months ago, but its effect is already remarkable in this community. There are already seven of them countrywide and eight are on the way. This is one of the two in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. You can imagine the extent to which we can succeed in our work if not only the youth, but communities as such can embrace such initiatives and allow them the requisite space to accomplish their missions.
I am satisfied that the work against HIV/AIDS in this province is done with seriousness and determination. The Provincial Health Department is tenacious and innovative in terms of its response strategies and programmes to combat the HIV/AIDS in this most affected region of our country.
There are also clear examples of the spirit of Partnership Against HIV/AIDS in this province where a multi-sectoral approach is evidently the norm. We welcome and encourage this trend where you have the different departments of the provincial departments and sectors of civil society working in an integrated and co-ordinated manner.
The monthly meeting of SANAC will take place in KwaZulu Natal in the coming month of August. It will be good to interact with the Provincial AIDS Council, some local AIDS councils as well as non-governmental and other organisations working in the field. That is another area where we would like to see local government and traditional leaders working collaboratively with traditional healers, youth groups, women organisations, faith-based organisations, people living with HIV/AIDS, the media, business, organised labour, healthcare workers, development agencies and other components of society in a combined campaign to stop HIV and beat AIDS. That is what the concept of multi-sectoralism is about in our multi-pronged war on HIV/AIDS.
In conclusion, I would like to call upon the youth of our country in whatever occupation - school, university, any profession or work or even those still in the added misery of unemployment -to take up the fight against HIV/AIDS as their own war. Defend yourselves, defend the future of our nation - defend our gains and our dreams. Losing the fight against HIV/AIDS is not an option.