Furthermore, governments of all countries affected by HIV/AIDS should immediately initiate a policy framework for human resource contingency planning to deal with the critical loss of staff. Public sector programmes should also be refocused from their current priority of reducing the overall size of the sector to dealing with the AIDS-related staff shortages, through making the best use of available personnel.

These recommendations were agreed at the end of a Commonwealth technical workshop on 'Reducing the Impact of HIV/AIDS on Human Resources in the Public Sector' held in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 21-23, last.

Representatives of 12 of the most-affected countries in Africa and the

Caribbean participated in the workshop. These included Botswana, The Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia, Malawi, Swaziland, Uganda and Zambia.

Each country was asked to send two delegates, one specialising in the medical and health aspects of HIV/AIDS, and the other in human resource management and training for the civil service. The workshop, convened by the Commonwealth Secretariat and funded by the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation, was hosted by the Government of Kenya.

"Almost all the current HIV/AIDS programmes concentrate on public health aspects of the pandemic, with little or no attention paid to the implications of the loss of national human resources, in particular to the capacities of the public sector to deliver essential services," said Michael Gillibrand of the Secretariat's Governance and Institutional Development Division (GIDD).

"Consequently, many of the countries face the threat of collapse of their essential public services and utilities due to reduction of professional and technical personnel below minimum tolerance levels."

"Research findings show that as a percentage of total population,

AIDS-related death rates are higher than the casualty rates of the worst wars," stated GIDD's Rosemarie Endeley. "The Second World War caused 20 million deaths worldwide in six years. Currently, 40 million people worldwide are HIV-infected and 2.3 million people die from AIDS each year in Africa alone."

In one African country, a recent pilot survey demonstrated that the public sector could expect to lose more than 9,000 staff (28 per cent) out of the total 33,000 public sector employees over the next decade.

The workshop proposed a set of actions for immediate adoption and implementation by governments. These include an analysis to map out the current and future attrition rates and training needs, taking account of the impact of AIDS on human resource demand and supply on the public sector and the whole economy.

The participants observed that the accelerated erosion of human capital has compounded the longstanding deficiencies in financial capital, skilled personnel, physical and institutional capacities in the public sector.

This had cost implications for national budgets and undermined the overall social and economic development of a country.

In particular, the loss of capacity of critical public services substantially increased the risk of failure to achieve United Nations millennium development goals. These include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger from the world, reduction in child mortality, improvement in maternal health and the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women.

Participants concluded that the long-term solutions to the human resource emergency caused by HIV/AIDS were prevention programmes, drug treatment and ultimately a medical cure for the disease. They suggested that efforts should be made to reduce the cost of drug treatment through international negotiations.

They noted that the Commonwealth is the first organisation to have highlighted the impact of HIV/AIDS on human resources. At the 1999

Commonwealth summit in Durban, South Africa, the Heads of Government in their communiqué recognised the human devastation caused by the virus and declared it "a global emergency".