SPEECH BY MS CHRISTINE MCNAB
 UN RESIDENT COORDINATOR

REGIONAL MEETING ON WOMEN, GIRLS AND HIV/AIDS,

22 - 24 FEBRUARY 2005
Le Royal Hotel

Your Royal Highness Princess Bamsa Bint Talal

Your Excellency Minister of Health
Excellencies
Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am honoured to have been asked to say a few words at the opening of this regional conference on Women, Girls & HIV/AIDS.

Many of you know far more than I do about the global and regional situations, so I will mention just one statistic: globally, nearly two thirds of young people aged 15 -24 years living with HIV are adolescent girls.

 This region is, so far, a low incidence region and we must work together to ensure that it remains so. Let me give you a snapshot from my own experiences in a high prevalence country in Sub-Saharan Africa, to show why it is imperative that we never reach the same situation in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

I lived in Zambia for just 5 months. During that time, my driver was called home from a neighbouring country because his wife died of AIDS shortly after giving birth to their last child. My driver died several months later. There is little chance that the child has survived. My cook was diagnosed as having AIDS. She is among the fortunate ones as she was immediately put on anti-retrovirals and made a recovery. But access to anti-retrovirals is still a rarity in the poorest countries. Our work with the Government was constantly disrupted by the illness and death of senior officials and government ministers with whom we worked. On the road to the city cemetery, there was sometimes a traffic jam of funeral processions.

Women took the brunt of the epidemic, caring for their husbands or their parents, often having to take their daughters out of school to help them, often ill themselves.

The picture was very dark, but there were also illuminating examples of how people coped and how young people in particular were coming together to combat the spread of infection. I was amazed at the strength and tenacity of young women running a media project to reach out to their peers, and school children forming information networks with the help of health workers, teachers and parents.

In this region, we need to better understand the dangers of allowing an epidemic to develop, and then make sure we need never be in a situation similar to that in the worst affected countries.