Asiafrica: Linking the Two Continents

This project uses information and communication technology (ICT) to build bridges across the geographical divide by stimulating cross-learning and joint action. The website supports this by encouraging organisations to share strategies, operational challenges, and solutions. Asiafrica serves to build features stories, interviews, perspectives, statistics, and resources such as "Training Manual for the Media: Gender, HIV/AIDS and Rights" and "The Language of HIV/AIDS: A Tool for Journalists/Newsrooms". It also serves to provide an online space for the documentation of lessons learned and the creation of a collective identity to communicate concerns from the local level to global policy processes.

The website had its beginnings with community arts and other groups from Africa and Asia that met, held discussions, and compared experiences during the activities of the Africa-Asia Interaction on AIDS initiative, supported by the Bangkok and Nairobi offices of the Rockefeller Foundation at the XV International AIDS Conference held in Bangkok, Thailand, in July 2004. The key areas of discussion included the importance of family and community to prevention, care, and treatment and mitigation efforts. These organisations developed the website to continue this interaction beyond this event. The project seeks to move beyond the common refrain heard at conferences that Asia faces an African-style scenario if it does not act quickly enough.

HIV/AIDS.

According to IPS, "Asia and Africa, two of the continents hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic, are also the locations of some of the most creative and effective responses to HIV/AIDS. Over the 20 years since HIV was identified, community organisations and art groups on these two continents have demonstrated remarkable skill, flexibility and stamina in dealing with the many challenges AIDS presents. Much of this work takes place in community settings that are economically disadvantaged where food, jobs, water and security are not assured, and where health systems are crumbling."