The budget for the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) is $322,000,000. Of this, 20% is to be spent on AIDS prevention. Of this $64,000,000, the Office of the US Global Aids Coordinator (OGAC) has mandated that half should be spent on preventing sexual transmission of AIDS and that the majority (2/3) of these funds be spent on abstinence and faithfulness activities.
Well, some countries have a very different culture from ours in many matters including their sexual practices. Seventeen of twenty PEPFAR country teams told the GAO that the mandated allocation of funds to abstinence and faithfulness result in fewer dollars being available to prevent sexual transmission of AIDS by other means, means which may be more in keeping with the needs of the countries in which they serve. So, is it more important that abstinence be promoted or that the lives of people whose culture differs from ours be saved?
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