Corporate Social Review Magazine 1st Quarter 2013 | Page 91

Annie Lennox

If you thought HIV/AIDS was under control, think again.
Annie Lennox did. In 2003, during a visit to South Africa,
hearing Nelson Mandela talk about HIV/AIDS and how it
was affecting women and children, she was ‘outraged,
angry, ashamed’. That visit set her on the path of activism,
advocacy and philanthropy.

Mitchell Besser: Annie and I met when she
came to visit mothers2mothers years ago
and she became one of our supporters. As
an organization, we benefit from the advocacy
she does for the global cause, making people
realize that we need to continue to focus on

  the epidemic, and we are not at a place where
we can say we’ve done that already. What she’s been able to do
is to continue to bring people’s attention back to the epidemic as
something that’s solvable. As an implementing organization, we
rely on the campaigners who continue to make sure that people
don’t lose interest, and we also rely on the philanthropy. The
implementers, the advocates and the philanthropists all have a
role to play.
Annie Lennox: What was really impressive about mothers2mothers
Caroline Hartnell met Annie Lennox
and her husband Dr Mitchell Besser,
who founded mothers2mothers, an
organization that helps prevent motherto-child transmission of HIV, at the UBS
Global Philanthropy Forum, held in late
November in Switzerland.
What led you to philanthropy in the first
place?
Annie Lennox Well, philanthropy is the
last part of it. The first thing that drew
me to the things I do was witnessing
injustice towards women and children
in circumstances that were so extreme
and yet so ignored, both globally and
in the countries that these things were
happening in. I’m talking about the HIV/
AIDS pandemic in southern Africa.
I was one of the artists invited to go to
South Africa by 46664, which is Nelson
Mandela’s HIV/AIDS foundation, to

was that they were specifically doing the work I felt needed to be
done. HIV/AIDS is a very complex issue. There are many strands
to it, and they’re difficult to disentangle. Maybe there is not one
solution; maybe there have to be several kinds of solutions. But
if a pregnant mother passes on the virus to her newborn child,
that’s simple, and mothers2mothers showed that working to
stop that was possible – it was a success story. That’s why I
was very inspired by the work that Mitch has been doing with
mothers2mothers for the last decade.
And it has been rolled out as an excellent blueprint which might
ap ply to things other than just HIV/AIDS. When you have brokendown healthcare systems that really don’t serve people well,
you have a drain on human resources – of trained doctors and
nurses going elsewhere – so you have to look at alternative ways
of helping the people of those countries get access to healthcare
and treatment.

perform at their launch concert in Cape
Town in 2003. The day after the event,
Mandela invited us all to join him in the
exercise yard of his former prison on
Robben Island, where he was to address
a gathering of international press to talk
about HIV/AIDS and how it was affecting
the people of South Africa, mainly
women and children. Mandela described
the pandemic as genocide, and that
is not a word that you can use lightly.
Listening to him, I started to understand
things differently. I had thought, like
many people in the West, that HIV/AIDS
was a problem under control; there
were treatments available. However,
in South Africa, and in other countries
in Sub-Saharan Africa, people weren’t
receiving these treatments. The virus
was wiping people out in numbers you
cannot even begin to imagine. Once I
started to realize how this was affecting
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women and children, it went very deep
with me, as a woman and a mother
myself. I was outraged, angry, ashamed
that I didn’t know more about it and that
the international community wasn’t doing
more to raise the profile of this issue. At
that time, Thabo Mbeki was President
of South Africa and taking something
called the ‘denialist stance’, claiming
that HIV/AIDS doesn’t actually transmit
itself into full-blown AIDS – which made
it very difficult for people to get access
to treatment.
I realized that women had a very small
voice in all of this, although they were the
ones who were most affected. I decided
that this was an issue I wanted to get
involved with. I wanted to contribute my
own voice to creating a bigger platform,
in any way that I could. So every time
I was invited to perform for Nelson
Mandela’s 46664 Foundation, I accepted
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