AIDS and Sustainable Development: the Community-based Approach

The tipping point for human transformation towards sustainability and social justice is to realize the need to take actions to demonstrate practical solutions to the world's pressing problems like AIDS. AIDS is a global issue. We propose a proactive whole systems approach to AIDS that is comprehensive, not symptomatic. This realization is based on the understanding that it is a lack of infrastructure and institutional development that makes AIDS a problem of such crisis proportions.

UN Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) are designed to promote a concerted global effort to address world urgent issues that primarily revolve around the dramatic gulf between rich and poor in the world today:

1.	Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2.	Improve maternal health
3.	Achieve universal primary education
4.	Combat HIV/AIDS
5.	Malaria
6.	Promote gender equality and empower women
7.	Develop a global partnership for development
8.	Reduce child mortality
9.	Ensure environmental sustainability

AIDS is a symptom of a breakdown in social structures that are basic human well being in any society:

1.	Africa accounts for 70% of global population of people infected with AIDS and 80 percent of global deaths.
2.	In Kenya, 15 percent of population is HIV positive and the economic impact amounts to 1.3 percent of GDP per year, reducing economic growth by around 25 percent a year.
3.	AIDS has reduced the status of many families to beggars and ravaged the educational sector reducing the number of teachers and has kept children out of schools so that they can take care of the sick.
4.	In Burkina Faso 25 percent of rural families have cut back on farm work and many are now threatened with death and starvation.

HIV/AIDS is a national disaster for the people of Africa as it is wherever it is found worldwide. Children face the loss of one or both parents and possibly being infected themselves, and youth are at great risk of being physically and sexually exploited, neglected, and stigmatized. They often drop out of school and face an uncertain and precarious future. Women and grandparents become the sole caretakers of their families. Communities suffer as do individuals and the society as a whole. AIDS has reduced the status of many families to beggars and ravaged the educational sector reducing the number of teachers and has kept children out of schools so that they can take care of the sick.

OVF AIDS Mitigation Strategy: A Proactive Approach
The challenges that countries face as they confront the AIDS pandemic are also opportunities. What's needed is an integrated front towards the mitigation of AIDS at the community level addressing health care, education, nutrition and clean water/sanitation. The goal is to provide economic as well as educational and cultural assistance to those underserved communities hard hit by the AIDS pandemic while also promoting sustainable development.

Any effective approach to AIDS mandates an comprehensive whole systems approach that sees AIDS as a symptom of a breakdown in social structures that are basic to human well being in any society. The symptoms of the AIDS Pandemic have only increased the structural challenges in Africa and other parts of the developing world that make social stability, prosperity and well being so elusive in these regions.

The notion of a proactive approach to AIDS expands upon the of simply addressing immediate needs by proposing a fundamental realignment in policy and approach to come up with a long term solution to the problem. Monies that address the AIDS problem directly and specifically must be complementary to programs providing financial resources to build schools, hospitals and other necessary infrastructure.

What are the Concrete Steps?
The solutions involved in this complementary process not only involves development monies but a careful selection of the kinds of projects that are targeted and also a effective program for cultivating and growing human capital. We see the oneVillage Initiative model as a tool for building such projects within Unity Centers.

Within the larger gamut of economic and policy reform at the macro-level we see the need to develop a network to coordinate a process of effective digital development promoting the proliferation of open and sustainable societies in emering markets. Such a Digital Development Network will ensure that macrolevel policy development goes hand in hand with effective aid and development programs at the grassroots. This requires a rethink in how African governments as well as the development community as a whole operates. Proper procedures and methodologies are needed to ensure accountability and transparency in relation to how limited human, financial and natural resources are allocated. Structural changes in how the global economy operates are also needed.

1.	Political process needs to be streamlined to make rulers more accountable to their people and to eliminate corruption.
2.	Empower Africans economically by promoting more cooperation within African to promote best practices towards proactive AIDS mitigation approach.
3.	Effective development strategy: Target development on specific regions that are most receptive to innovation and reform in relation to fighting by overcoming Dependency economics and the moral and social corruption that results, which leaves African societies ill-prepared to fight AIDS.
5.	Open information sectors in emergingto a diversity of media entrepreneurs with emphasis on the education of women about their rights to say no to sex and to domination by men
6.	Ensure adequate health response to HIV/AIDS that includes both education/prevention and treatment as well as more comphrehensive approach to health care.
7.	Eliminate farm subsidies in developing nations to reduce artificially low farm and commodities prices but put the needs of feeding Africa before sustaining affluent nation consumer demand for coffee, pineapple and other luxury crops.

AIDS and Sustainable Development: the Community-based Approach of oneVillage Initiative
Sustainable development will be the driving force in the new economy. AIDS has given Africans a kind of resolve that we do not see in other parts of the world. The right mix of investments focusing on the development of human capacity and well being at the community level has the potential to enable rapid expansion of effective as well as ecologically and socially sustainable economic practices in Africa to address the root causes of the AIDS devastation in Africa.

The more basic ingredient in this process is in the people in the communities in Africa most determined to break with the flawed thinking of the past and exert real leadership in their societies as part of an effort to rebuild their communities. oneVillage Initiative is really a process to assist local communities in this rebuilding process by offering an integrated suite of resources through ICT that augment the community and peace building process mentioned in the bullet below:

1.	Discuss the top priorities of various groups in the community
2.	Learn about their existing coping mechanisms and adaptive strategies
3.	Focus on the opportunities and the bottlenecks in terms of fully realizing the potential of local resources, human and ecological.
4.	Consider how each part of the whole needs to contribute what they are best at and to reflect on how they can better accomplish their goals in life