HIV and AIDS: The Global Inter-ConnectionFOREWORDDuring the last fifteen years, the HIV epidemic has entered our consciousness as a threatening and incomprehensible calamity, already laying claim to millions of human lives, inflicting grief and pain, causing uncertainty and fear and threatening economic devastation. It poses serious problems everywhere for sustainable human development, but it is especially devastating for the countries of the developing world. Eighty per cent of the world's population lives in the countries of the developing world. That is where an estimated 13 to 18 million people, mostly children, die from hunger, malnutrition, and poverty-related causes each year. In Africa, one in 21 women already die in pregnancy or childbirth, in Asia, one in 54, in Latin America, one in 73. For each one of these women, another 15, 98 per cent of them in the developing world, become ill or disabled each year as a result of complications in child bearing. One billion people live in households too poor to obtain the food necessary for sustaining normal work. Half a billion live in households too poor to obtain the food needed for minimal activity. One-third of all households in the developing world are headed by women and, already by 1990, at least a quarter of the women heading households were elderly. These are the countries where 80 per cent of new HIV infections are occurring, and it is estimated that by the year 2000 90 per cent of all new infections will occur there. The havoc which could be wrought by the HIV epidemic, combined with these already existing conditions, is potentially traumatic, beyond the comprehension of most of us. Despite the complexity of the causes and consequences of the HIV epidemic people have been finding ways to respond. Individuals, families, villages, communities are organizing and working together to support those affected, to assist the survivors, to help each other change behaviour in order to remain uninfected. UNDP is committed to supporting these processes of change which originate in the dreams and aspirations of affected people themselves. This book of personal reflections allows the voices of some of these individuals to be heard. James
Gustave Speth
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