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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 03/04
Mitigating HIV/AIDS' Impacts on the Civil Service and Teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa
Mumukshu Patel, Terry F. Buss and Ryan Watson
December 2003
Executive Summary
The HIV/AIDS pandemic has crippled many African nations for years - stifling economic development, eroding the ranks of the civil service and limiting the success of educational systems. This strategy paper, arising from the National Academy of Public Administration/USAID conference in Washington DC, on November 17-18, 2003, identifies critical policy gaps in existing studies, and then elaborates on what strategies might be used to formulate an effective plan for dealing with HIV/AIDS impacts on the civil service in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Ministries of Education, where teachers have been affected by the pandemic. Mitigating the effects of HIV/AIDS on the education sector is especially important, because this sector trains all public servants, is often the largest employer in government, and the private sector, for that matter, and is crucial to economic development.
We provide some background on the problem and how it can be mitigated through policy and program a menu of comprehensive strategies that could mitigate the pandemic's impacts on the civil service and education workforce. Major strategic approaches include:
- information/data availability for essential planning and decision making,
- capacity building to ensure effective short-term responses, maintaining the smooth functioning of the system,
- constructive partnerships for generating a comprehensive effort to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, and
- resource intensive long-term initiatives to stabilize workforce supply and guarantee appropriate prioritization of development issues in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Literature Review/Annotated Bibliography
The following pages list out some of the documents that were reviewed in order to lay out issues and isolate strategies for the conference strategy paper. Out of the enormous literature available on the topic of HIV/AIDS, and education/public sector, I selected documents that I thought addressed the specific topic of HIV/AIDS and its effects on teachers - supply side of education - and civil servants. The other selection criterion was the wide availability and accessibility of the literature; I have listed only those documents that are available over the Internet. This will help individuals across the world interested on the topic to accessibility to relevant literature.
The list provided below is not exhaustive, but it does review all the major studies/reports on the topic. Desmond Cohen, Malcolm McPherson, Michael Kelly, Allan Whiteside are some individuals who have done seminal work in the field, and individuals interested in getting acquainted on the topic may want to refer to their work; there are several other researchers in the field, and I am doing injustice to them by not referring their work here, but space constraints pose a limit that I have to bear. The documents listed and those available on the databases mentioned here constitute at least ninety percent of the total literature on the conference topic. I hope that researchers and practitioners will find this literature review helpful.
