Cape Town - After almost two decades spent fighting for HIV treatment and access to medicines, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) may close its doors due to a severe funding shortage.
The TAC has just one-third of its budget for next year, according to Mark Heywood, head of public interest law organisation Section27.
Donor-funding cuts have forced the Aids advocacy organisation to retrench staff and cut programming at least twice in recent years.
Heywood said the organisation, once dubbed the world’s “beacon of HIV activism” by former UN Special Envoy on Aids in Africa Steven Lewis, cannot survive another downscaling.
“If we get to the beginning of 2015 still with one-third of the budget and have to discuss scaling back the TAC, then actually we might as well discuss closing,” Heywood said.
“Scaling back causes rupture, demoralisation and programmes to be interfered with at a critical time. It usually takes several years to recover from,” said Heywood, speaking on the final day of the bi-annual Southern African HIV Clinicians Society Conference, in Cape Town at the weekend.
At the meeting, HIV physicians noted a renewed need for the TAC’s brand of patient-treatment education with the January introduction of earlier HIV treatment and the need for antiretroviral (ARV) patients to begin annual viral-load tests from doctors.
Viral-load testing, which measures the amount of HIV in a person’s blood, is the best way for doctors to check whether patients are responding to treatment or if they need to be switched to a different kind of ARV treatment.
As more donors pull out of South Africa, Heywood said sustaining the HIV response – and the work of HIV advocacy organisations like the TAC – would be up to South Africans.
“Civil society brought the notion for the first time that people with diseases, people living with HIV should be consulted and should be part of planning and be part of response,” he said.
“Increasingly, this is being overlooked and civil society is being marginalised from debates and policy-making.”
The TAC is selling its iconic “HIV positive” shirts – which have been worn by Nelson Mandela – as part of a fund-raising campaign that includes online donations via the fund-raising site GivenGain.
“Civil society brought to the Aids epidemic everything that now defines the response to the epidemic in South Africa.”
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