Lovelife

Spoornet has renewed its commitment to keeping the loveLife AIDS education train on track, signing a one-year agreement with loveLife and Legal I on Thursday. The loveLife train, a community project, travels from station to station stopping for six days at each station throughout the country. Its aim is to provide free legal advice, HIV/AIDS awareness and life skills. It also focuses on issues that affect young people in the areas of sexuality, child abuse and teenage pregnancies. In a statement, Spoornet spokeswoman Bintu Petsana said the agreement gave Spoornet the option to renew for a further one year, subject to agreements between Spoornet and loveLife. Spoornet has spent almost R3-million on the refurbishment of the coaches and spends around R800 000 annually on the operation. The train project started off focusing mainly on free legal advice and since its inception in 1998, lawyers have assisted on average 6 000 people a year at 33 stations. Following its success, other community projects focusing on HIV/AIDS and life skills were incorporated. loveLife joined the Spoornet Legal I train in 2001. (Source: SAPA, 13 February 2003)

The government this week announced a R375-million partnership with the United States foundation behind loveLife, the biggest national HIV-prevention programme for youth in the world. The US-based Kaiser Family Foundation has pledged R100-million a year for three years and the government R25-million a year. The foundation, which has been active in health programmes in South Africa for 13 years, was instrumental in the launching of loveLife in September 1999. The prime objective of loveLife is to reduce the rate of HIV infection among 15 to 20 year olds by at least 50 percent over five years. Drew Altman, the president of the foundation, and Manto Tshabala-Msimang, the health minister, signed a memorandum at a dinner in Johannesburg on Wednesday. The partnership will be ratified in three months with a formal, legally binding agreement. The move was lauded by Jacob Zuma, the deputy president, on Thursday when he announced the deal at the launch of a loveLife youth centre, known as a Y-centre, in Mandeni in KwaZulu-Natal. It was the seventh of 15 planned Y-centres to be launched since 1999. Zuma, who heads the South African National Aids Council, said that the partnership had been announced in the Mandeni area to highlight the government's serious concern about the scale and ferocity [with which] HIV-Aids is engulfing our rural communities and youth in those communities. (Source: The Sunday Independent, 21 July 2001)