25 July 2008

Jakarta, Indonesia: UNV volunteers in Indonesia - some of whom are people living with HIV - are deploying to study the impact of HIV/AIDS at the household level.

Their work will ultimately lead to a report set for launch in Bali during September 2009 at the ninth International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific. The project brings together UNV, UNDP and the International Labour Organization (ILO), and this month received start-up finances from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Programme Acceleration Fund (PAF).

There are about 193,000 people living with HIV in Indonesia. This is under 0.2 percent of the population, but the rate of infection is increasing rapidly. Moreover, due to Indonesia's large population – 245 million people spread over 17,000 islands – verifying the true scale and consequences of HIV there is very hard.

The new joint research programme aims to document the impact of HIV/AIDS on ordinary Indonesians. It will look into unemployment and loss of income in HIV-affected households, the implications for women and children in particular, plus the effects of social attitudes and stigmas. It will also examine how volunteerism can make a difference to people living with HIV.

Four Indonesian national UNV volunteer coordinators will be based in four provinces, aided by UNV volunteer field researchers who will survey households affected by HIV. To help build trust, these volunteers will themselves be people living with HIV. Other researchers will be recruited from the Indonesian National Bureau of Statistics to conduct the survey  among non-HIV affected households.

UNV is also recruiting UNV volunteers to support the Indonesian Government manage the funding it receives for the battle against killer diseases. These national UNV volunteers will help the Indonesian Ministry of Health manage the money it receives from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) - a multi-billion dollar resource directed at aggressively tackling three diseases that kill over 6 million people every year.

Induction training for the first 16 UNV volunteer finance associates was completed in early July. Another 17 national UNV volunteers will be recruited in 2008, raising the total involved in the HIV/AIDS capacity development support programme to 33. They will be based in every province of Indonesia, working to build the capacity of local institutions and partners.

During 2007, there were 70 UNV volunteers in Indonesia, two-thirds of them Indonesian nationals. The new HIV/AIDS personnel will make up the second-largest group of UNV volunteers in Indonesia, behind those involved in reconstruction and rehabilitation after the 2004 tsunami. There are also around 20 national UNV volunteers in Papua working in communities toward the UN's Millennium Development Goals.