Japanese NGO receives US $500,000 for HIV prevention

A Japanese NGO, Amis d'Afrique, has received US $500,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support an HIV education and prevention project in the Central African Republic, the director of the NGO, Mizuko Tokunaga, told IRIN on Tuesday. Tokunaga said the funds would be used over a five-year period for HIV education, seminars on HIV prevention, and the training of community animators in the southern provinces of Ombella Mpoko and Lobaye with a combined population of 549,708. Tokunaga said the education segment of the programme would start next week. Tokunaga said the donation resulted from a visit by the parents of Bill Gates, and the former US President Jimmy Carter to Amis d'Afrique in March 2002. Gates, a multibillionaire, is chairman of Microsoft Corporation and founder of the foundation bearing his name. Operational in the CAR since January 1993, Amis D'Afrique is supported by the Japanese government, through the World Bank. Tokunaga said that in 2002 the NGO received 1,752 new adult patients for consultation. Among them, she said, 1,337 were HIV-positive. During the same period, the NGO provided protein-enriched rations to 18,096 children. A study conducted in December 2002 by the Pasteur Institute in Bangui revealed that 14.8 percent of the CAR's 3.5 million people were HIV-positive, ranking the country as the worst affected in the subregion.