Philippe Douste-Blazy

The UN Under-Secretary General for Innovative Finance, along with HIV experts and advocates, is urging governments to tax financial transactions such as foreign currency exchanges to help fund HIV and other development work.

“We have to fight to convince countries to do this,” Philippe Douste-Blazy said at a press conference today at the AIDS 2010 meeting in Vienna, Austria, referring to the recommendation in a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to implement bank taxes. “If we advocate that it’s for developing countries, it will be very hard for governments to say no.”

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Ms. Dehab Belay

A CRS project that focuses on burial societies known as idirs is helping thousands of people in Ethiopia to talk about HIV and take action, according to a presentation by Dehab Belay, a CRS staff member who recently completed a study on the program’s effectiveness.
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Funding sustainability depends on local ownership and leadership, and is built through capacity building that starts at the beginning of a project and adapts to changing circumstances, according to a presentation given by the Chief of Party of AIDSRelief, a 10-country treatment grant funded by the U.S. Government, and for which CRS is the prime agency.

Presenting information on funding ART for sustainability at a pre-conference gathering for Catholic organizations on Sunday, July 18, 2010, Michele Broemmelsiek said sustainability means that “persons living with HIV have uninterrupted access to quality HIV care and treatment.”
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Shannon Senefeld

Speaking at a symposium on Children and HIV, a CRS technical advisor explained how a socio-ecological framework can be used to support the development and implementation of multi-sectoral programs to address gender inequality in multiple settings.
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Guy Vanmeenen

Small savings and lending groups are helping communities throughout rural Africa to save money and help the very poor, a CRS staff member told participants at a pre-conference on Children and HIV, held in Vienna on July 17th, the day before the opening of AIDS 2010.

Guy Vanmeenen, a CRS Senior Technical Advisor based in Nairobi, said the concept of savings and internal lending communities – also known as SILC – is a relatively new approach and an innovation within the microfinance industry.
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Non-governmental organizations held numerous consultations and workshops today in Vienna in the lead-up to AIDS 2010, a global conference scheduled to start Sunday July 18 in the Austrian capital.

Speaking at a symposium on Children and HIV, the head of UNAIDS said universal access for children is about more than the ability to receive treatment. “It’s about social justice,” Michel Sidibe said in his keynote address. “I’m here because I want to be a part of a new movement that places children at the center of the [HIV and AIDS] agenda.” Read on »

CRS held a conference titled “ICT4D” (Information and Communications Technology for Development) in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 11-13, 2010. Guided by the theme “Knowledge and Innovation,” the conference aimed to devise an agency-wide strategy that will enable projects to use ICT solutions that are backstopped by the staff, management, and support necessary to deploy them successfully. Attendees included both CRS staff and external participants. For more information about the event, please click here.

A recent article at USCatholic.org provides some insight into the CRS-sponsored “Water, Conflict and Cooperation: Practical Concerns for Water Development Projects” discussion. For archival purposes, the text of that article is available on our site, along with some additional pictures of speakers on the panel.

CRS and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program organized a panel discussion about water’s complex role in conflict and development on January 6th in Washington, DC. Titled “Water, Conflict and Cooperation: Practical Concerns for Water Development Projects,” the meeting followed the release of a CRS publication titled Water and Conflict, which describes how water scarcity, access to water supplies, pollution of water sources and transboundary water management play a role in disputes, political manipulation and, in worst cases, outright conflict. Click here for more information on this and other CRS publications in Water and Sanitation. To learn more about the discussion, click here.