Back our effort to defeat spectre haunting Africa

The G8 should join African students' fight against Aids, which robs the region of vital talent, says Mandisa Mbali.

At an academic seminar a few years ago, I noticed that a student I knew had lost a lot of weight and looked unwell. As a student writing a thesis on Aids, I wondered if he had the condition. I considered asking him whether he had taken an HIV test and telling him about the university's HIV treatment programme. I decided against it, thinking that as we were not close it would be inappropriate for me to discuss his health, especially in relation to such a stigmatised disease. A few weeks later he died of Aids.

Among supervisors and lecturers who had taught him over the years there was an undeniable sense of loss. He was the first in his poor rural family to attend university. Aids had robbed South Africa of another skilled person.

In October last year, I conducted an Aids speaking tour of several UK campuses with three other student activists. The tour was part of the Stop Aids Campaign, which is linked to the Make Poverty History campaign. On the tour, we campaigned for full funding for the multilateral Global Fund, which was set up to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. We also pushed for full debt cancellation and for the removal of unfair donor conditions on aid to fight Aids.

British students were shocked to learn how deeply Aids had hit the lives of everyone in Africa. We toured with a Ugandan student living with HIV who described how he had lost his father and brother to Aids. He was unsure how he would access treatment when he required it.

Most British students we addressed had never known anyone with HIV. It is estimated that 50,000 British people have HIV compared with 5 million to 6 million South Africans. UK students were shocked to learn how Aids affects every aspect of higher education in Africa. Infected students often die before or shortly after they graduate. This means that loans are not repaid, which threatens the viability of student funding.

I started doing voluntary Aids work in my second year. Our student Aids committee initially focused on HIV prevention. It became clear to us that there were many students who were already living with HIV. So we began demanding that our university provide HIV treatment. In 2002, our committee became a branch of the Treatment Action Campaign. Tac is a nationwide HIV treatment access movement.

Partly as a result of our lobbying, the university developed a policy to provide HIV treatment. Students are referred from the campus clinics to nearby sites, where the university provides subsidised treatment.

The Commission for Africa report, which will be discussed at the forthcoming G8 summit, calls for more investment in higher education. It recognises that HIV/Aids is wiping out students and staff. It calls this "depleting capacity". However, it does not discuss how to retain and develop such capacity in the context of a growing and deepening Aids pandemic.

Some limited progress appears to have been made on debt cancellation in the run-up to the G8 summit. But it is unclear whether G8 countries will heed the report's call for full funding for the Global Fund, which is drastically underfinanced. Money is vital - the initiative is the only legitimate multilateral forum for Aids funding. By giving through it, donors can avoid duplication and aid can be distributed fairly.

Unfortunately, it seems that some G8 countries favour giving aid in their own right rather than through the fund. Some of the pitfalls of this approach are evident in the $15 billion (£8.2 billion) offered by the US to several heavily affected countries. Critics have argued that the money has unfair strings attached. In particular, we have contested the fact that a third of the prevention budget is going to abstinence-only programmes.

Aids funding should be spent on evidence-based programmes and not be driven by sexual conservatism. People in Africa, as in Britain, need information on all methods of HIV prevention and access to condoms.

The Commission for Africa report laments the impact of Aids on African higher education institutions. To mitigate that impact, African universities need to provide high-quality HIV treatment and prevention services to students. In turn, this requires that African students living with and affected by HIV be included in the making of Aids policy in higher education. To allow African institutions to do this, wealthy G8 countries must fully finance the Global Fund.

Mandisa Mbali is a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She will shortly take up a Rhodes scholarship to study a DPhil in modern history at St Anthony's College, Oxford.