United Nations Radio

The outgoing head of UNAIDS has been talking about the future challenges for the agency.

Dr. Peter Piot told the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board that among the challenges are sustaining leadership and funding for AIDS, especially against the background of the current global financial crisis and the need to implement some science-informed policies.
Another challenge he says is UNAIDS cannot compromise in fulfilling human rights and lastly, there's the big challenge of capacity building.

Peter Piot

"We must shift some of our funding, I believe, from going through the short term results and investing it in capacity-building -be it for monitoring evaluation for civil society groups, but also governments. In some countries, civil societies have more capacities than governments, so we really need to invest there. Institutionally, this will mean that the Global Fund and UNAIDS will have to come as close together as possible under the current institutional arrangements because that is going to make the money work, that is going to provide some efficiency gains."

Dr. Piot says his main lesson over the last 14 years is that UNAIDS can move mountains if it has targets, a clear strategy to build its work on science and forge an effective alliance with multiple partners.

This is Donn Bobb reporting for United Nations Radio.

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