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Asiafrica: Linking the Two Continents

Country

Thailand

Regions

Africa, South East and East Asia

Programme Summary

The brainchild of Inter Press Service (IPS) Asia-Pacific and IPS Africa, Asiafrica: Linking the Two Continents is a website-based project that aims to encourage information sharing between Asia and Africa around HIV/AIDS-related issues. It focuses on linking organisations in the Greater Mekong Subregion and South-east Asia to like-minded organisations and individuals in East Africa.

Communication Strategies

This project uses information and communication technology (ICT) to build bridges across the geographical divide by stimulating cross-learning and joint action. The website supports this by encouraging organisations to share strategies, operational challenges, and solutions. Asiafrica serves to build features stories, interviews, perspectives, statistics, and resources such as "Training Manual for the Media: Gender, HIV/AIDS and Rights" and "The Language of HIV/AIDS: A Tool for Journalists/Newsrooms". It also serves to provide an online space for the documentation of lessons learned and the creation of a collective identity to communicate concerns from the local level to global policy processes.

The website had its beginnings with community arts and other groups from Africa and Asia that met, held discussions, and compared experiences during the activities of the Africa-Asia Interaction on AIDS initiative, supported by the Bangkok and Nairobi offices of the Rockefeller Foundation at the XV International AIDS Conference held in Bangkok, Thailand, in July 2004. The key areas of discussion included the importance of family and community to prevention, care, and treatment and mitigation efforts. These organisations developed the website to continue this interaction beyond this event. The project seeks to move beyond the common refrain heard at conferences that Asia faces an African-style scenario if it does not act quickly enough.

Development Issues

HIV/AIDS.

Key Points

According to IPS, "Asia and Africa, two of the continents hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic, are also the locations of some of the most creative and effective responses to HIV/AIDS. Over the 20 years since HIV was identified, community organisations and art groups on these two continents have demonstrated remarkable skill, flexibility and stamina in dealing with the many challenges AIDS presents. Much of this work takes place in community settings that are economically disadvantaged where food, jobs, water and security are not assured, and where health systems are crumbling."

Partners

The Rockefeller Foundation

Contact

Asiafrica: Linking the Two Continents
Inter Press Service (IPS)

Source

Asiafrica website on May 13 2005 and February 9 2009.


Placed on the Communication Initiative site May 13 2005
Last Updated May 21 2009



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