2005

This report is about AIDS and Africa, and the world’s response to both, and presents three stories describing possible futures. These scenarios demonstrate that, while societies will have to deal with AIDS for some time to come, the extent of the epidemic’s impact will depend on the response and investment now. Applying and sustaining the learning of the last 20 years will make a fundamental difference to Africa’s future.

According to the writer as these scenarios demonstrate, it will be because the lessons of the first 20 years of the epidemic were not learned, or were not applied effectively. It will be because, collectively, there was insufficient political will to change behaviour (at all levels, from the institution, to the community, to the individual) and halt the forces driving the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

This report states that the nature of the three scenarios describes a different, plausible way in which the AIDS epidemic could play out across the whole of the African continent. They are rigorously constructed accounts of the future that use the power of story-telling as a means of going beyond the assumptions and understandings of any one interest group, in order to create a shared basis for dialogue and action about critical and difficult issues.

The epidemiological descriptions are explicitly not projections of what will happen. Rather, each scenario is illustrated by a model, based on one of three assumptions.

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