AfricaIs aCountry

Move Something

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Move Something

By
Caitlin L Chandler

By Caitlin Chandler
This World AIDS Day, rather than pay attention to celebrities who are “dying digital deaths,” or wearing red, do something small or big that can have an actual impact.

Learn about how the upcoming EU free trade agreement with India could prohibit people from accessing HIV treatment, and support people working on ensuring HIV medicines in India remain affordable.

Check out the new campaign from the International Planned Parenthood Federation called Criminalize Hate, Not HIV. Didn’t know that HIV transmission is a crime in some countries, even though criminalization fuels stigma and hate towards people living with HIV? Get informed.

Donate directly to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB & Malaria or to a local HIV organization in your community — because even if governments reduce HIV funding, people can step-in.

Think about how the country you live in could improve its response to HIV. The Uganda government is currently cracking down on the rights of sex workers to organize, the Russian government is denying citizens access to treatment, the Canadian governmenthas no plan for reducing new HIV infections, Obama isn’t fulfilling his campaign commitments on HIV and gets a bit angry when held accountable by young people…and the list goes on. But at the end of the day, political leaders won’t change unless they’re pressured to — so think about becoming politically involved.

There are many other ways to do something meaningful this World AIDS Day — just get out there and move something.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.