NELSON MANDELA tells The Times today that he fears that the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria will be starved of the cash it needs in the next two years.

Claiming that international donors have contributed barely half of what the fund needs for 2006 and 2007, he says that it is a “crying shame” that the project is battling to secure the resources it needs. Donors had pledged a total of $8.6 billion (£4.7 billion) by 2008; to date they have given $4.3 billion. “Once the current spirit of global commitment to the fight against HIV/Aids is lost it will never be restored,” the former South African President says. He praises the success of projects supported by the fund in Brazil, India and Thailand, as well as in South Africa, where, according to a Unesco report, 600 people die each day from Aids-related diseases and six million are HIV-positive, 100,000 of them children.

He applauds loveLife, the Aids-awareness programme for youth, which is designed to help the post-apartheid generation — growing up with democracy and the deadliest of modern diseases — to understand their passions. LoveLife, a coalition of community-based groups, private foundations and media groups with an annual budget of £20 million, believes that orthodox public health interventions have “bored the young to death”.

David Harrison, loveLife’s chief executive, said that the campaign tapped into youth culture “to make ‘safe sex’ sexy in a non-didactic manner”.

It combines a high-powered media campaign — “for young people, by young people, in a language they understand” — with adolescent sexual health services in South Africa’s varied communities.

Part of the philosophy is to get youngsters talking freely about sex — a topic that has largely been taboo in traditional communities. Huge, colourful billboards and newspaper advertisements bombard them with the message that sex is fun and loving, but that unsafe sex is dangerous and likely to be fatal. Rappers and kwaito singers, hugely popular in the black townships and in white suburbs, convey loveLife messages in their lyrics.

But loveLife and similar Aids awareness organisations, such as the Topsy Foundation and the Treatment Action Campaign, have enormous cultural and political obstacles to surmount. Baby rape has reached almost epidemic proportions and a survey of 260 South African lorry drivers, for example, showed that one third of them believed that sleeping with a virgin could cure the disease.

The country also has a President, Thabo Mbeki, who early in his presidency said he did not believe Aids was caused by the HIV virus. He came under attack yesterday from Zwelinzima Vavi, the leader of South Africa’s Cosatu trade union confederation. He said that government tardiness in supplying antiretroviral drugs to sufferers was a betrayal of its people.

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