Nigeria Content Online

The United Nations
agency, UNAIDS, has negotiated with European Commission for a three-year
grant of 2.4 million euros to strengthen the coordination of technical
support provision in six countries which include Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana,
Malawi, Nigeria and Swaziland. Out of this sum, Nigeria is benefitting
about 400,000 euros.

David MacRae,
ambassador of the European Union delegation to Nigeria, who disclosed
this at the weekend in Abuja at the signing of the memorandum of
understanding between the National Action Committee on Aids (NACA),
European Union and UNAIDS said the MOU provides the framework for an
EU-funded project designed to strengthen national capacity to scale up
towards universal access to HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment and
develop a national technical support plan on HIV/AIDS.

“The EU has worked
to develop a programme for action to confront HIV/AIDS, malaria and
tuberclosis through external assistance, mobilize funding and develop
effective ways to provide assistance to our partners to raise awareness
and deliver prevention, treatment, care and support to the population
affected by the pandemics,” he said. “Nigeria is one of six countries
benefitting from such grant and will receive 400,000 euros under this
grant.”

Mr. MacRae stated
that putting HIV/AIDS and other communicable diseases under control is a
challenge, adding that the EU is fully committed to making a major
contribution to the success of this undertaking and desires that with
this financial support, UNAIDS will support the NACA to develop its
technical support plans and coordinate its implementation in order to
save lives of millions of people.

Kwame Ampomah,
UNAIDS country coordinator, Nigeria said technical support is critical
to addressing gaps and bottlenecks in the implementation of the national
response, while observing that technical support provided to countries
before now have remained unplanned, ad-hoc, supply-driven and
uncoordinated.

“Recognizing these
technical support challenges, UNAIDS in December 2007 developed a
guidance note on technical support planning. The guidance note provides a
general framework to assist national aids coordination authorities to
effectively plan, coordinate and better manage the technical support to
scale up national HIV/AIDS responses,” he said. “It is for this reason
that MOU for the grant agreement is being signed today. The key
deliverables of the grant is the development and implementation of a
national technical support plan that will ensure better coordination of
quality technical assistance for national aids response.

Working together

Mr. Ampomah
canvassed the support of all stakeholders for the initiative through
active participation in development and implementation of the technical
support plan, in addition to making financial contributions that will
sustain the EU, NACA and UNAIDS collaborative effort saying that they
must act fast to accelerate progress at achieving universal access to
HIV/AIDS prevention in Nigeria. John Idoko, director-general of NACA
stated that national response to HIV/AIDS will not improve without
adequate human capital in place.

“In order for us to
do all we want to do, we need to build human resources capacity and it
can be built not just by us but also by technical assistance. There is a
hidden gap you cannot see. You can see a gap of infrastructure, but you
cannot see the gap of intellectual knowledge skill. That has to be in
place to make the response more effective so as to achieve the universal
access we have been talking about,” he said.

He said that local government, states and national aids control agencies will benefit from the funds over a three-year period.