The Next 16 Years

In 2000, when the world gathered in Durban for the first international AIDS conference in Africa, the disease was raging. For most, AIDS was a death sentence. Rich people could access the newly available treatment, which cost nearly US$10,000 a year; poor people couldn’t. So the poor died of AIDS, by the millions. That injustice – along with personal pleas from an 11-year-old boy called Nkosi Johnson, who was dying of AIDS, and from world leaders like Nelson Mandela – galvanized the global health community to act.

Today, antiretroviral therapy for people living with HIV costs as low as US$94 a year. More than 17 million people are on treatment – half of them through Global Fund-supported programs. AIDS-related deaths have dropped by 41 percent. Never before in the history of global health has a disease galvanized so much goodwill.

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