"Economists tend to see the impact of AIDS in terms of money values, but that isn't good enough," says Professor Tony Barnett from the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics. "I want to get away from the idea that costs can only be measured in dollars and look at what the loss of a parent - or the inability to work because of AIDS related illness - really means to an individual and to society as a whole. What it boils down to is how do you measure the value of love? What is the value of a cuddle to an orphaned child?"
Having been involved with 50 research projects in the field, Barnett is convinced that quantitative accounts of the effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic do not capture its impacts on societies and economies. "Forty million people who are HIV positive, two million children orphaned by the epidemic, each AIDS death adversely affecting five other people, reduction of GNP growth by 2.5 per cent a year for the next 15 years in several African countries - the statistics are shocking but they do not begin to inform us of the real cost of this epidemic," he says. "We want to find a way of incorporating qualitative factors into impact assessment and policymaking."
Jady Graslund, 9, gets a hug and is welcomed back to Newclare primary school after a hospital visit. Jady, whose mother died of an Aids-related disease and now lives with an aunt, is living with HIV and takes medication twice a day and visits three hospitals a week for treatment. She attends a regular school and is fully accepted by her classmates and teachers.
Tony Barnett, who was one of the first recipients of an ESRC Professorial Fellowship, is in the middle of a three-year project on the social and economic impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. According to Barnett, the ESRC fellowship, which frees researchers from the constraints of administrative and teaching responsibilities, is a 'fantastic opportunity'. "It allows us to engage with one of the most significant events in the development landscape for this generation," he says.
An HIV/AIDS epidemic has very important social and economic implications for development because it is mainly sexually transmitted and because of the age specific incidence of the disease. Unlike other epidemics it affects young and mature age adults more than it affects other members of any society. It therefore affects the structure of populations, increasing the number of dependants to productive citizens, and unbalances the supply and quality of labour. "A young man of 15 in Botswana today is close to 100 per cent likely to contract HIV infection in his lifetime," says Barnett. "One should think what that means for economic, cultural and political futures: for 'development', in other words."
Unlike other epidemics it affects young and mature age adults more than it affects other members of any society.
Current data on the epidemic is often flawed and without reliable information it is impossible to plan for the future, Barnett warns. "It seems likely that effective rollout of anti-retroviral treatments will only provide a window of opportunity lasting between five and ten years before viral resistance kicks in. We need to have the surveillance and response systems in place soon to deal with that challenge."
Tony Barnett explains that over the last 20 years, funding limitations have caused development studies to be increasingly concerned with the minutiae of the immediate present. "One result is that very big issues challenging progress towards, for example, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have often received scant attention. Nowhere is this more apparent than with regard to HIV/AIDS issues," he says. "HIV/AIDS is far more than a public health issue, there are few problems in development studies that do not have an AIDS angle, whether we think of livelihood analysis, gender studies, Participatory Rural Analysis, and Rapid Rural Analysis, macroeconomic and trade policy, intellectual property rights issues, cultural analysis of change, policy development or myriad other familiar areas in which research is undertaken."
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