World AIDS Day Honors 25 Million Who Died As We Continue to Battle HIV
FrontLines - December-January 2009-10
Your Voice: Robert Clay
Your Voice, a continuing FrontLines feature, offers personal observations from
USAID employees. Robert Clay is the director of the Agency’s Office of HIV/AIDS.
This column was written a few weeks before World AIDS Day 2009.
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Robert Clay
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I had just finished my first
year of graduate school at UCLA
when the first case of HIV was
reported in Los Angeles. Little
did I know how that event, happening
so close to my school,
would affect and influence my
professional life. Over the next
three decades, HIV/AIDS would
play a central role in my USAID
career and become a passion and
driver of my work.
As deputy director of the
Health and Nutrition Office in the
1990s, I helped oversee the HIV/
AIDS division’s work and
program. But HIV/AIDS was only
a disease I read about and discussed.
It took my Foreign
Service posting in Zambia in 1998
for HIV/AIDS to become real.
One in five Zambians was
HIV positive, and because the
epidemic had been underway for
15 years, illness and death were
at an all time peak. Our home
was on the road to the city cemetery,
and long funeral processions
were daily occurrences.
It was during my first year
there that I personally experienced
the devastating death of one of my staff from AIDS. It
changed our entire office and we
were inspired to do all we could to ensure others did not face the
same fate. It was those five years
in Zambia, at the heart of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic, which convinced
me of the importance of
prevention—especially reaching
the next generation with effective
messages.
Reading the predictions for
the next HIV/AIDS wave to hit
key Asian countries, I was motivated
to share what I learned in
southern Africa with this region.
With my five-year assignment to
India, I was witness to the large
scale expansion of the Indian
response to high risk groups and
key geographic areas. We
focused the majority of our
efforts on building the local
capacity of the government and
civil society to ensure sustainability.
The scale of this effort
was enormous given that most
Indian states’ populations are
greater than those of many
countries.
I am now back in
Washington, leading the HIV/AIDS Office in the Bureau for
Global Health. This is a very
important time as the second
phase of the President’s
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
(PEPFAR) is being implemented
with a new coordinator, Amb.
Eric Goosby, and a greater focus
on sustainability and country
ownership.
Even though we have made
tremendous progress over these
28 years—PEPFAR alone in the
past five years provided care to
more than 10 million people living
with HIV/AIDS, supported 2
million people on life-saving
treatment, and reached 58.3 million
people through prevention
messaging—the fight is far
from over.
So on World AIDS Day and in
the coming year, we should all
remember and honor the 25 million
people who have died from
this epidemic and recommit ourselves
to do all we can to address
the personal tragedy caused by
HIV/AIDS.
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