Authors: Jacques du Guerny and Lee-Nah Hsu

Foreword

Paradoxically, although the HIV/AIDS epidemic has long been recognised as a global epidemic, policy and programme responses have to a large extent been conceived of and implemented within the framework of national borders.
Even if the vims knows no borders, action within national borders benefits from many advantages, which have been clearly shown in a previous paper on the use of mapping assessments in national policies and programmes . However, action within national borders has its limitations and a response which attempts to deal with HIV within its catchment areas set by population movements and mobility systems, requires action beyond the national level. Part I of this paper explores how a number of South East Asian countries became aware of this issue and are organising their responses, a high point of this process being represented by the November 2001 Declaration on HIV/AIDS by the ASEAN Heads of State at their summit.
Once such awareness and understanding takes place, the key is the operationahzation of policies and programmes beyond national borders in responding to mobility; this is discussed in the second part of this paper. This second part shows how programmes have to expand their activities from interventions on migrants to more complex and holistic interventions on mobility systems. It is shown that this process can take place over several phases as experience is acquired-It is also demonstrated that such an approach naturally leads to linking sectoral interventions, which have often been considered in isolation, to mobility interventions under a general framework for HIV/AIDS and Development. It is thus that in the presence of HIV/AIDS epidemics, development strategies need to be revisited by giving human factors considerably more importance than generally happens.

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May 2002