The African Jesuit AIDS Network (AJAN) is launching a campaign to promote universal access to AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve improved wellbeing for people with HIV.

The AJAN campaign will gauge the extent of real access of people living with HIV not only to ARVs but to easily available and comprehensive healthcare services that guarantee proper management of their condition.

Jesuit AIDS ministries, Jesuit social centres and other close partners will undertake research in some 10 to 15 countries. The research will identify gaps in services and ways they can be filled, by listening to and giving voice to the experience, views and needs of those most affected: people living with HIV themselves. AIDS associations and other NGOs will also be interviewed.

AJAN will join its campaign partners and other NGOs in making use of the research to urge African governments to take more responsibility for their domestic AIDS response and to work in earnest to achieve genuine, equitable and sustainable universal access.

An underlying aim of the campaign is to advocate so that those governments that have not yet done so will honour their commitment undertaken in the 2001 Abuja Declaration to allocate at least 15% of their annual budget to healthcare – the basic minimum for a functioning primary healthcare service.