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The government was "coming round" on the issue of providing antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to people living with HIV/AIDS, former president Nelson Mandela said on Thursday.
"Apart from the question of lack of funding, because it is very expensive, they are coming round," he was quoted as saying.
Mandela was addressing patients, activists and staff during a visit to a clinic in Khayelitsha township on the outskirts of Cape Town, where international NGO Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) monitors 3,000 patients and provides free treatment to 300 of them, South African news agency SAPA reported.
The clinic was started in May last year as a partnership between MSF and the Western Cape provincial government. According to MSF, only one in every thousand people who need ARVs in the country are getting the drugs, half of them through the Khayelitsha clinics.
MSF also announced on Thursday that it would join forces with Mandela to create a new HIV/AIDS treatment project near Umtata in the Eastern Cape province.
"With the Nelson Mandela Foundation, we hope to create another project in South Africa that prolongs people's lives, and serves as a roadmap for scaling up treatment here and in other countries," Dr Eric Goemaere head of the MSF mission in South Africa, was quoted as saying.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions