UNAIDS: How do you see the current economic climate affecting the AIDS response and what can countries do to mitigate the impact?

UNAIDS: How do you see the current economic climate affecting the AIDS response and what can countries do to mitigate the impact?
Sigrun Mogedal: It’s extremely complex and difficult to say how the economic crisis directly affects a country’s AIDS response.

Sometimes financial crisis, or the fact that you don’t have everything, helps you to move in a direction where you’re more effective and efficient and where you find new ways of doing things better.

Rather than saying “I have this big bag of money and I want to use it,” instead see what are the hard choices I may need to make and how can I bring together different efforts that work towards the same purpose.

Of course that’s not the whole story, because unless you have money, unless you can lower drug prices, unless you have delivery systems with health workers in place— and they need their salaries—there’s no way to maintain and sustain the response.

Countries need to include health and social services as part of their own commitment to growth and development. You can’t get that from outside. You really have to have a policy that drives change from the inside, and that’s what you need for the HIV response too.

UNAIDS: You have been at the forefront of bringing up a new generation of leadership in the AIDS response; why is this important?
Sigrun Mogedal: First of all it’s important because a number of us who’ve been engaged for a long time are getting old, and, like me, are retiring [laughs].

But also the way we’re trained and act is not that helpful in dealing with complexity. We’re not so clever when we see a complex situation at understanding how you can think and engage in different ways. Somehow we’re set in our own ways.

But when I speak to young people, they have an energy and ability to navigate new ways of communication. I’m really amazed at how they are able to see all possibilities. They don’t need much encouragement as their curiosity and concern for justice, is not just programmatic but something they carry inside themselves. It inspires me.

I’ve been working alongside Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway whose main focus is young people and the AIDS response. She has been helping me to open those doors and open my mind to what that means.