>>Annie Lennox: I'm delighted to be here.
Thank you, Google, for inviting me to address
an extraordinary collection of people.
You're all incredibly influential and powerful
and successful in your own right.
And I am very passionate, as you have just
said -- I have just said on the video, about
women's rights.
And in particular, one issue, and that is
HIV and AIDS as it affects women and children.
I'd like to share with you how I started my
journey into this.
And it's an interesting journey.
Sometimes things come to you that you hadn't
predicted.
And just out of the blue one day, I was invited
in 2003 to perform for Nelson Mandela's launch
of his 46664 Campaign, his HIV and AIDS campaign.
This was a great concert that was held in
Cape Town in South Africa with wonderful artists
and we came with collective voices to draw
attention to this issue.
46664, as some of you may know, was Nelson
Mandela's prison number, was the number he
carried for most of the 27 years that he was
incarcerated, particularly on Robben Island.
The day after the concert, Mandela invited
all the artists that had performed to join
with him on Robben Island to an international
press conference.
And if you look closely there, you can see
tremendous luminaries such as Richard Branson,
Beyonce, Bono, Brian May from Queen, and it
was a very exciting moment for all of us,
very humbling to be with Mandela personally
and stand with him in unity about the message
that he was going to give to the press.
Here he is.
He is actually standing in front of his former
prison cell.
It was an incredibly symbolic moment.
He is addressing the international press,
and he is telling them about the pandemic
that's been affecting his countrymen for the
last decade.
Now, you have to know that HIV and AIDS started
to really kick up in the late '80s and early
'90s, and I don't think the country was prepared
for what it was about to face.
You know, you had a huge death rate.
And at that time, the people were not able
to get access to treatment.
It was blocked because of the President's
view, President Mbeki, Thabo Mbeki.
He had a particular view that made it very,
very difficult for anyone to respond effectively
to this pandemic.
Listening to Mandela's words, he spoke about
how it was affecting women and children, and
I listened.
I like to know about the world.
I think I'm a fairly intelligent person, fairly
well informed.
And what really shook me was that I hadn't
understood the full extent as to how women,
in particular, were being affected by HIV
and AIDS.
I'm a mother, and being a mother makes me
-- gives me the capacity to identify with
other women.
And the thought of pregnant women having the
virus and giving birth to a baby, beginning
of its life, passing on that virus, if you
can imagine the effect and the impact that
that has, not just on the generation of the
mother but on the child, too.
So you're looking at post Apartheid South
Africa, post rainbow nation, and post truth
and reconciliation.
And what you're seeing is a deadly virus spreading
throughout the whole population, a thousand
people or more every single day dying unnecessarily.
It's a plague of sorts, and unless you actually
witnessed it, it's very, very hard to imagine
the extent of the effect on the population.
And I was really shocked, you know, because
I hadn't read about it on the front newspapers,
you know, the front pages of newspapers.
We have bird flu, swine flu.
It almost brought the United Kingdom to a
halt.
We're terrified of flying anywhere, and yet
in South Africa, you have one of the highest
instances of the virus, and people are dying
like that.
And we're not -- we're not doing much about
it.
I'll ask you a question just briefly.
How many of you knew that even currently one
in three pregnant women in South Africa are
HIV positive?
Would you raise your hands if you knew that?
One, two, three.
How many people are here?
I mean, there must be about -- how many?
300?
400 people and three people knew that fact.
You're intelligent, informed people.
Don't you think it's kind of strange that
you didn't know that?
I thought it was very strange that I didn't
know.
And that's why I'm here talking about it.
I made it a mission statement for myself as
a woman to try to become part of the voice,
part of a collective voice that could raise
awareness.
And that's why I'm so grateful that Google
have invited me here today because I see that
you really do need to know about this.
This is massive.
I went to South Africa, I went back and because
of 46664, I had the opportunity to visit hospitals.
A little girl here, a little baby girl.
I'm not exactly sure how old she was, but
I have visited baby girls of one year old,
weighing less than a bag of sugar.
This child clearly has full-blown AIDS and
you never quite know if the child is going
to survive or not.
So it's very harrowing when you see a child
of that age infected with HIV, knowing that
they don't have much of a chance.
Happy children dancing in an orphanage.
There are thousands of orphanages like this
across the whole continent of Africa.
In a way, thank God, because their parents
have gone.
And on the other hand, what's going on that
you have so many orphaned children?
This was a very good orphanage as it happens.
It was run by a Catholic nun who was an incredibly
charismatic woman.
I was terribly proud of the work which she'd
done, and the children were in good hands,
thank goodness.
I went to visit a family.
This is a child-headed household.
If you can remember that phrase: A child-headed
household.
There's something really wrong about that.
Why would a household be headed by a child?
The tallest boy that you can see there was
the eldest brother, is 14 years old.
His mother and father had been buried in the
backyard.
They had both succumb to HIV and AIDS and
he is left to take care of his three younger
siblings.
And you know that there are 14 million orphans
that have been affected and impacted by HIV
and AIDS particularly living across the whole
of the continent.
It's deeply and profoundly shocking.
And this photograph was taken in a cemetery.
I was standing in a graveyard.
And you can see there it says -- it's the
grave, cross, the wooden cross of a child's
grave that was about two years old when they
died.
And I'm using this photograph to illustrate
to you that HIV and AIDS affects children
in a way that if they're born with the virus,
they most likely won't reach their fifth birthday,
which is really shocking when you come to
think about a generation of babies being born
into a country when they really don't have
a chance.
Heartbreaking.
Okay.
So this is a map of the global preference
-- prevalence, excuse my French.
I can barely speak.
The global prevalence of HIV.
It's a strange little map.
Across the world, currently there are 34 million
people living with HIV.
And in Sub-Saharan Africa, you can see the
reason why the map is hugely bloated.
Because 23 of the 34 million are living there.
Now we're going to look at adult HIV prevalence
rate.
Ten countries there listed.
Every one of them is African.
The top three, Swaziland, Botswana and Lesotho
were almost a quarter or roughly a quarter
of the population of those three countries
-- now, that means one in four people -- are
living with HIV.
Now, compare that to the number at the top.
That is global prevalence.
It's less than 1%.
It makes you think.
Looking here at a photograph of a mother and
child.
It's a very beautiful photograph, but when
we are thinking about pregnancy, 90% of HIV-positive
pregnant women, 90%, are living in Sub-Saharan
Africa.
Annual pregnancies in HIV-positive women.
In the United States, every year we have 7,000
pregnancies of HIV-positive women.
In Rwanda, a smaller, much smaller African
country, 8,000 women are pregnant with HIV.
Now, you have to think about the size of the
countries and get a sense of the scale of
it.
Now we're looking at one hospital in Soweto,
a township in Johannesburg.
8,000 pregnant women with HIV pass through
that hospital every year.
And now the final shocking statistic.
Every year in South Africa, 300,000 women
are pregnant with HIV and AIDS.
This really, really sums up the contrast for
you.
Discrepancy.
1,100 children are born infected with HIV
around the globe every day, less than one
in the United States, one in Europe, 100 in
Asia, and the Pacific.
Now we're going to see, as you can imagine,
more than 1,000 children are born every day
with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
I think I'll just let us take a moment to
think about that.
You hadn't heard that statistic before, I
assume.
I hadn't.
That's why I'm here.
Let's go back to the global prevalence pictures.
You can see the bloated, huge map of Africa
there.
Something strange about that one.
Africa has shrunk to nothing, more or less,
when it comes to doctors working in the world.
Sub-Saharan Africa has 25% of the global disease
burden in the world but only 3% of the world's
health workers.
Now we're going to look at staffing ratios,
health care workers per 100,000 population.
Now, the data is 2007, but it hasn't changed
five years later.
Looking at the United Kingdom you can see
that we have 230 doctors and 1,280 nurses
to every 100,000 people in the population.
Going down to Mozambique that's highlighted
at the bottom, get this, three doctors and
21 nurses.
And I've been to rural areas in the eastern
cape of South Africa where there were two
doctors for 200,000 people living in the north
districts.
And you're like, What?
This can't be possible.
It's absolutely true.
It feels like a dark fiction.
And here's another dark fiction.
Unfortunately, it's a fact, not a fiction.
This photograph was taken several years ago
at the height of the epidemic.
It was taken in a graveyard outside of Durban
in South Africa.
And as you can see, there are literally hundreds
of graves where bodies had just been interned.
And I have vivid memories of driving through
South Africa seeing striped awnings, striped
tents and thinking, That's really nice, somebody
is having a garden party.
It wasn't a garden party.
It was a funeral.
And you saw them everywhere.
And you saw that business was thriving with
the coffin makers and undertakers, very good
business.
And I went to a supermarket, and there were
coffins being sold beside the gardening tools
of every size from small to big.
This is a kind of stark, sobering reality.
Now, the thing is we have made tremendous
steps in responding to this pandemic.
It is hugely challenging, and it is a complex
issue without any question.
And in the economic downturn that we are facing
today, many NGOs are having to close down
and they're having to face the reversal of
fortune.
And this is what we don't want to see again.
So the SING campaign is really basically my
own initiative.
It's not a big campaign because basically
it's just me with my two feet and my opinions
and my voice.
And I've taken myself to many countries around
the globe.
I've performed, I've talked, I've tried to
raise this issue.
I've try to make people aware of what's actually
happening, a reality in a celebrity-fixated
culture that we live in, that these truths
are happening on a daily basis for years and
we're not aware of them and we're not really
doing a great deal about it.
And so I made a Web site, not myself personally,
but I asked some very nice person who knows
about these things to make a Web site.
And I went off and made little film pieces.
I went to Comic Relief.
I'm sure many of you know about Comic Relief.
Magnificent organization in our own country
here in the United Kingdom who have supported
me tremendously.
I tried to learn about the issue so that I
could pass the facts on to people so I could
be an ambassador, I could become a spokesperson,
I could have a platform.
And I decided one of the things I could do
on one of my sort of presentations, which
happened to be at the Scottish Parliament
-- and as you might hear, I'm slightly Scottish,
very much still.
And very kindly I was asked to speak at the
festival of politics a few years ago.
And I presented this to the members there
and to the general public.
And I asked them if they would be very kind
and make me an envoy for my country so I could
have a bigger platform.
And, subsequently, I have been to Malawi with
the Scottish Parliament.
And we visited many projects that were connected
to Scotland and I'm very happy to have that
partnership, that relationship.
I'm also a UNAIDS goodwill ambassador.
Michel Sidibe, the director of UNAIDS, is
the very handsome, intelligent and compassionate
gentleman who is sitting next to me.
He's the director of UNAIDS.
And Michel and I when we have the opportunity,
we talk together.
We speak about HIV and AIDS on radio and television
and we go and talk to politicians and we talk
to civil society.
We do whatever we can to keep the issue on
the platform.
And I'm also, as it happens, an ambassador
for London, which is the city that I live
in because I really, really just want to have
as big a platform as I possibly can.
I really want to galvanize as many people
as I can who feel just as passionately as
I do about what I consider to be a fundamental
human rights issue.
You know, because in the West, if you are
a woman and you are pregnant, you can get
access to treatment and medication.
However, if you happen to be living in sub-Saharan
Africa, it's very, very challenging.
UNAIDS last year set up a global plan for
the elimination of pediatric AIDS.
This is very significant.
And they pulled in 22 of the countries that
are most affected by the virus.
And our intention is to see the end of pediatric
AIDS by 2015.
And we believe that can be done, but we know
that it will take commitment, engagement,
passion, inspiration.
There is plenty of that in this room, by the
way.
We want to see mothers kept alive, and we
want to see the eradication of the virus being
passed from the mother to the child.
It's very, very simple.
It's not rocket science.
It's challenging, but we believe it can be
done.
Here's a lovely mother.
We were having a chat.
She is HIV positive, by the way.
And she was smiling because that baby was
due to be born imminently, and she was very,
very confident because she was on treatment
and she understood that her baby was going
to be born free of the virus because we had
the medication.
She was going to receive it.
And that is really basically -- when I see
that picture -- I was very happy, and I still
am when I look at it.
Just before I round off, I'm going to introduce
you to a little girl called Avalili.
Avalili in this photograph was 7 years old,
and we met her in a hospital in a very remote
part of the eastern cape of South Africa.
Her mother had AIDS, and Avalili was born
with the virus.
At this stage in her life, she had full-blown
AIDS.
She had pneumonia.
She weighed less than a 1-year-old child.
She was stick thin and skeletal.
And we really didn't know if that child was
going to survive.
It was very, very sad spending time -- a whole
day we spent with her filming her.
When we left, we were really very emotional
because we didn't know if that child was going
to make it or not.
And it felt very, very strange.
And thanks to good nutrition at the hospital,
access to good medical care and treatment,
five months later when we went back to film
Avalili, this was the child that we saw.
Now, that's not magic.
And that's not tricks.
That's real, and that's what I'm campaigning
for, and that's what I want to see.
And I want to see every single child having
access to good nutrition, decent health care,
treatment for HIV and I want to see the eradication
of pediatric HIV once and for all.
And I really believe, and I appeal to you,
please engage with this issue.
Between us, we can do it.
It is really possible.
It's not impossible.
Thank you for your time.
[ Applause ]
