The US State Department warned employees not to use government funds to commemorate World Aids Day this month and to “refrain from publicly promoting it through any communication channels”, reports The New York Times – but the day does not belong to Washington, say activists and campaigners.
It belongs to Africa.
Since 1988, in America and elsewhere, including Africa, 1 December has been recognised as World Aids Day, when people mourn those who died of the disease, honour efforts to contain the epidemic, and raise awareness among the general public.
But not this year.
Last month the US State Department instructed employees and grantees not to use government funds to acknowledge the day, the directive forming part of a broader policy to avoid social media and other messaging “on any commemorative days, including World Aids Day”.
A State Department spokesman said the Trump administration was “modernising its approach” to countering infectious diseases.
“An awareness day is not a strategy,” he said. “The department is working directly with foreign governments to save lives and increase their responsibility and burden sharing.”
To some activists, the administration’s decision was a painful reminder of the early days of the epidemic, when HIV was neglected as a public health crisis.
“It just seems petty and hostile, frankly,” said Peter Staley, a long-time activist and co-founder of PrEP4All, an NPO that aims to broaden access to prevention options for HIV.
Mark Pocan, the representative who leads the Congressional HIV/Aids Caucus, said the administration’s refusal to participate in World Aids Day was “shameful and dangerous”.
World Aids Day is when the State Department sends data to Congress from the President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief (Pepfar), which provides money for HIV programmes worldwide.
The programme’s budget was sharply cut back earlier this year, and the administration is reported to be planning to end it.
At the time of publication it was unclear whether the department still planned to send the data, as it is mandated to do – but on a different day.
The department did not respond to questions.
World Aids Day Belongs to us, not Washington
However, while America's decision to retreat from public recognition of the day and to withhold the release of its annual HIV data is being treated globally as a political earthquake, Tian Johnson writes in Health-e News that World Aids Day was not created in a US Government office and does not depend on a White House proclamation to exist.
He writes:
It was built from the grief of communities, from the organising of activists, and from the insistence that people living with HIV had the right to be remembered, treated and heard – from our blood, from our pain, from the violence that we felt as a result of stigma, when communities hated us, when clinics shunned us, when our governments criminalised us.
The trap is to ask why the United States is stepping back.
The real question is why Africa should ever have depended on Washington to light a candle, publish a number, or acknowledge our losses.
Africa’s story is larger than the silence of any foreign capital. Our continent has carried the weight of this epidemic in our hospitals, families, budgets and burial grounds.
What matters is not that the United States has gone quiet. What matters is that Africa refuses to. Our voices do not require validation from a donor who can choose silence when the politics shift.
African ritual of remembrance and resistance
For African communities, World Aids Day is not symbolic. It is the day we name our dead out loud and recount the victories for which they fought. It is when we measure whether our governments are keeping their promises. It is when young organisers hear their history and understand that they are inheriting a movement, not a tragedy.
The global narrative often forgets that Africa built its own pillars of this movement.
The Treatment Action Campaign and others used marches and litigation to force the government to do what science and humanity demanded.
Community health workers kept people alive long before governments provided proper treatment. Networks of women living with HIV documented abuses when no national database would.
The United States can fall silent but it cannot rewrite this truth: Africa remembers, and Africa organises.
Africa’s future depends on African data, not donor politics
Africa’s HIV progress was never a donor miracle. It was the ability to produce and defend our own evidence. South Africa’s first national survey in 2002, conducted in the midst of government denialism, exposed the scale of the crisis and shattered the political myth that HIV was an invention.
That survey, and the data systems that followed, helped drive treatment to nearly 6m people and contributed to a decline in daily infections from roughly 1 460 in 2000 to just more than 400 two decades later.
Data did not save lives by sitting in a spreadsheet. Data saved lives by forcing power to confront reality.
That same logic fuels the work continued by many of us across the continent.
At the African Alliance, we gather evidence that governments often overlook and donors frequently under-estimate. Our HIV Cureiculum and our community pandemic prevention preparedness and response (PPPR) tools support a continent that wants to shape science rather than simply receive it.
Our partnerships across Kenya, Zambia, South Africa and beyond serve one purpose: to make sure that African data and African voices remain central to decision-making.
If a donor chooses silence, the remedy is not to beg for its voice. The remedy is to deepen our own.
US withdrawal a vacuum, not a verdict
Many are interpreting the United States retreat as a sign that global commitment is collapsing. That is a narrow reading of a wider political moment.
Yes, the US remains the world’s largest bilateral HIV funder. Yes, the shrinking of its public commitment has consequences. But the global response will not be endangered by the absence of a press release.
It will be endangered if Africa fails to build its own accountability ecosystem.
This moment invites a continental reset. African governments can no longer rely on donors to define success. The African Union and Africa CDC have matured into institutions capable of shaping HIV, PPR and health financing agendas.
Regional bodies have begun co-ordinating procurement, surveillance and community feedback systems. Civil society networks and community groups have developed their own evidence bases, and they have done so without waiting for donor permission.
The danger is not that the United States has gone quiet. The danger is that some African governments may find this silence convenient. The withdrawal of donor scrutiny can easily become an excuse for weak monitoring, for slow programme delivery and for shrinking civic space.
The contradiction is obvious. While donors pull back from transparency, African communities continue to generate the very data that makes accountability possible.
What we must not do is inherit the silence of others. Our dead deserve more. Our future demands more.
Next chapter of the HIV response must be written in Africa
The lesson of the past four decades is simple. When power retreats, movements rise. When governments delay, communities mobilise. When data are hidden, evidence is produced from the ground up.
The world may be entering an age of donor fatigue but Africa is not entering an age of surrender. We are entering an age of data sovereignty, political clarity and community intelligence.
Africa will commemorate World Aids Day because it is ours. Africa will publish data because our lives depend on it. Africa will continue the fight because the movement that was born in grief has grown into a continental demand for dignity.
The US may choose silence. Africa chooses memory, evidence and justice.
Tian Johnson is the founder and strategist of the African Alliance, a Pan African health justice organisation working across the continent to advance community-led science, accountability and dignity in public health.
The good news is that since the cutting of UNAIDS funding by the US earlier this year, the Chinese Government has provided $3.49m to expand HIV prevention services in South Africa, reports Mail & Guardian, with Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi saying the disease requires “collective action from around the globe and every contribution helps”.
The two-year project, starting in January 2026, aims to boost HIV prevention and harm-reduction services by expanding access to HIV prevention programmes for adolescents and young people in 16 Technical and Vocational Education and Training colleges in high-burden districts across seven provinces.
UNAIDS will implement the project in collaboration with the China International Centre for Economic and Technical Exchanges; the Departments of Health, Higher Education and Training, and Correctional Services; the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime; the WHO; and Higher Health – an NPO devoted to the health, wellness and psychosocial well-being of students in the post-school education and training (PSET) sector.
The three provinces most affected by the cuts to HIV and TB prevention services are the Western Cape, North West and Gauteng, according to the Department of Health’s Consolidated Impact Assessment report.
At the launch at the Chinese Embassy recently, Chinese ambassador to South Africa Wu Peng told Mail & Guardian that the funding contribution was not intended to serve any political agenda, but was an initiative aimed at helping citizens.
Motsoaledi declined to answer whether the support meant the government would no longer rely on or appeal to the United States for assistance.
“I’m sure you are aware I’m just a health worker; I don’t determine our foreign policies… I decline to answer because I don’t want to cross the line,” he said.
South Africa spends more than R46bn annually in response to HIV and Aids, he said.
“Every contribution is significant. We are receiving a lot of assistance from many partners. We appreciate this because fighting this disease requires collective action from everybody around the globe. A virus is an infectious agent, and they don’t recognise borders or need passports… Helping a country that has a huge burden is not an act of charity – it is an act of collaboration to ensure we bring an end to the disease.”
Health-e News article – World Aids Day Belongs To Us, Not Washington (Creative Commons Licence)
Mail & Guardian – China steps in to fund SA’s HIV fight
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
World Aids Day: Uniting to fight the triple threat of HIV, TB and COVID-19
World health at a crossroads as Trump dumps WHO
Furore over Trump’s withdrawal of WHO funding
South Africa shines in global overview of HIV/Aids research excellence