This blog posting from Refugees International mentions a local organisation that can provide antiretroviral therapy for just twenty dollars a month. If that price includes service delivery then it is among the lowest costs for ART care in the world and deserves support.
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Burma: From the Ground Up
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Just one month ago, Refugees International led its second mission inside Burma this year. We continue to see the importance of ground truth – witnessed first-hand – in the debate over whether to engage the country with humanitarian aid or punish it through isolation. And the facts from inside the country continue to convince us of the need to engage. Here are a few vignettes to illustrate that point:
* At a monastery in the eastern portion of the cyclone-ravaged Ayeyarwady delta, we visited a monastery that is operating as an orphanage and school for poor children. They house, feed, clothe and educate 200 children, many of whom come from the conflict-riddled eastern states of Burma, and which also include a number of orphans from Cyclone Nargis. They educate an additional 500 local children, all for free. When asked how much money it costs to run the whole institution, the head monk informed us he needed about $2,000 US per month. He lamented that he raised most of this money through speaking tours on Buddhism that he took around the region because he was not on the radar screen of international donors.
* A tour guide we met in Yangon had organized an emergency relief effort for cyclone victims by calling on his former clients and asking them for money. After raising $10,000 he distributed needed goods throughout the delta for three months. He would like to continue doing this type of work, but doesn’t think he can find work in the humanitarian field.
* A Yangon-based organization that provides training and small grants (mostly below $10,000) to community-based organizations throughout the country has gone from working with 12 organizations before the cyclone to more than 350 since the storm hit. They have an additional 150 proposals to work with other groups, and are having a hard time keeping up with the demands for their services.
* An international organization working in Burma’s “dry zone” – an area constantly hit by drought – has been running a project to drill deep wells since the 1990s. They have brought in heavy equipment to do the drilling, and provide wells for 10 villages a year. The drill sits idle 70% of the year because a lack of funding does not allow them to work in more communities per year.
* A Burmese organization that is now expanding from Yangon to other parts of the country provides counseling for people living with HIV/AIDS. Because their patients do not have access to life-saving drugs, their counseling focuses on teaching Buddhist meditation as a way to come to terms with the fatal illness. Providing drugs for their patients would only cost $20/patient/month.
These stories continue to prove to us that there are actors doing life-saving work in Burma who could do more if they received more funding. Despite this, Burma continues to be one of the lowest international assistance recipients in the world at only $2.88 per person, per year – approximately 20 times less than the average developing country receives. Unfortunately, the US is one of the leading culprits in this lack of aid. Though the US generously gave $50 million for cyclone relief in 2008, it has not announced, nor has the Bush Administration requested, any funds for cyclone relief in 2009. Without continued funding, the work of so many good organizations like the ones described above will go without, making their work even harder in the upcoming year.
--Sean Garcia
http://www.refugeesinternational.org/blog/2008/09/burma-from-ground-up.html
