The Universal Postal Union (UPU), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNI Global Union today announced the launch of a global HIV prevention campaign in the post offices of seven pioneering countries.
Over the next few weeks, visitors to some 16,000 post offices in Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Estonia, Mali and Nigeria will receive important information about how to prevent HIV through a series of eye-catching posters and hand-out materials, which also direct people to UNAIDS’ multilingual HIV prevention website.
The partners will work to extend the campaign to as many countries as possible, with the potential of making its way into 600,000 post offices worldwide. The campaign will reach millions of people who use postal services every day as well as 5.5 million postal employees, who make up one of the world’s largest workforces.
“With 600,000 post offices around the world, the postal network is a natural partner for this campaign. It is the single largest health-awareness initiative ever launched globally by the postal sector, demonstrating the huge outreach and value of the universal services it provides,” said UPU Director General Edouard Dayan. “The campaign is a strong example of what one industry can do to help achieve the important Millennium Development Goal of halting the spread and reversing the trend of HIV/AIDS by 2015,” he added.
“With more than 7,400 new infections occurring every day it is clear that HIV prevention efforts need to be stepped up urgently,” said Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS. “The postal network has an extremely wide outreach; it is open to everyone from the young to the old and is an excellent and innovative way to raise awareness about how to prevent HIV”. The ILO and UNI Global Union will focus on helping Posts inform staff about HIV during the second phase of the campaign, to start in 2010.
The campaign will culminate in 2011, with Posts being encouraged to issue postage stamps that year to commemorate the discovery of AIDS thirty years earlier.