We are used to hearing all about “AIDS in Africa” as if AIDS was a huge problem across a massive continent. In fact, some countries and regions in Africa are doing quite well in the fight against AIDS and have new infections under control, while other countries still struggle with their response.
Talking about “AIDS in Africa” obscures more than it illuminates, argues the ONE Campaign in a big new report released today, ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1. ONE shows how there is wide divergence in levels of political will, financial investment in different countries, leading to differing results that ought to be disambiguated.
To that end, the report shows which countries in Africa have reached the AIDS tipping point in which the number of new people on treatment exceeds the number of newly infected people. This number is calculated by dividing the total number of new infections in a year by the number of people newly on treatment in that year. A ration of 1.0 is the ‘tipping point.”
The countries in dark orange are the ones that have reached that tipping point. In all, says ONE:
16 of the 37 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which data exists had reached or surpassed this milestone in 2012. Of the remaining 21, five were incredibly close to reaching the tipping point, with a ratio of between 1.01 and 1.1, while the remainder had a ratio ranging anywhere between 1.5 and 21.3 (and even going backwards, in the cases of Liberia and Mali)
Read the full report at ONE.org