‘From Health Crisis to Development Crisis: A Challenge to the Development Approach to HIV/AIDS.’

Over the past decade, the HIV/AIDS crisis has been reconceptualised from a health problem, with an emphasis on the behavioural and biomedical aspects, to a development problem, in which major development organisations have taken on a predominant leadership role. This reconceptualisation has been praised for increasing awareness of the wider contextual factors impacting on HIV/AIDS; however, it has not yet provided effective policies and solutions for this crisis. This paper argues that certain characteristics of mainstream development are at variance with the multiple dimensions and demands of the crisis, including a bias towards economic factors, an ignorance of the political context and a top-down organisational structure.