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Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance receives $1 million from Gates Foundation
2003-028-6
2/11/2003
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[Episcopal News Service]
The San Francisco-based Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance (GAIA) announced today that it has received a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fight HIV/AIDS in Malawi, Africa.
The grant enables GAIA (www.thegaia.org) to launch the Malawi Women's Empowerment Project to train a network of women in rural Malawi villages in HIV/AIDS prevention and care. These women then would be deployed throughout southern Malawi to provide counseling and medical referrals to those living with HIV/AIDS.
The GAIA Malawi initiative is based partly on research from the 2002 International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, which found that empowering women in developing countries is a key to reducing the number of new HIV infections. The organization was founded by the Rev. William Rankin, former president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts, in June 2000 in the wake of the Durban AIDS Conference.
GAIA has effectively trained nearly 500 health and religious workers in Africa in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, working successfully in Tanzania, the Rift Valley of Kenya, Mozambique, and more recently, Malawi.
GAIA, established in 2000, is a non profit organization dedicated to slowing the spread of HIV/AIDS in African and other developing countries. GAIA's programs involve training health and religious leaders of all faiths for HIV prevention and care, and supporting village level projects through grants.
'GAIA is profoundly grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its support in allowing us to expand our work in Africa in the area of HIV/AIDS prevention and care,' said Dr. Charles Wilson, chair of the GAIA Board of Trustees and emeritus chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco (UCSF). 'Empowering women continues to be a major barrier to health education and treatment. This grant will help to empower women and reduce HIV incidence.'
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