By John Knox
The Scots singer Annie Lennox has used a visit to the Scottish parliament to appeal to the men of Malawi to change their sexual ways and prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS.
Lennox has just returned from a trip to Malawi where she visited several HIV-related projects being run by Scottish charities. "How do you get a man to use a condom?", she was asked. "I don't know all the answers," she said. "But somehow we have to change the mindset of men in Malawi.
"Young male teachers are being sent out from college to teach in rural schools and many of them assume they can have sex with their pupils – and they don't use condoms."
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Lennox is a special envoy on HIV/AIDS for the Scottish branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Last month, she went on a fact-finding tour to Malawi and made a 26-minute film to show to MSPs and others to highlight the work being done by Scottish charities. In the film, Lennox is seen visiting the Theatre for a Change project, which takes drama into colleges, army barracks and police stations to challenge men about their sexual behaviour. She is also seen visiting a Waverley Care project in Blantyre (in southern Malawi), which helps women sex workers to escape from prostitution. A young woman tells her that she was persuaded to have sex with a priest and was then abandoned when she became pregnant. "If that happened to me," Lennox said, "abandoned with a child, living in absolute poverty, I might become a sex worker too. "But there is now less of a stigma about being HIV positive in Malawi. People are beginning to talk about it. And the voice of women is strengthening." Lennox told MSPs that one-third of maternal deaths in Malawi are caused by AIDS, while 20 per cent of children die under the age of five because of HIV-related issues, such as poverty and infection. She said there are 850,000 orphans in Malawi, most of whom have lost their parents due to AIDS. Among the projects Annie Lennox visited were the Open Arms children's home in Blantyre, a Big Issue homeless project, a Red Cross grannies club and a Mary's Meals feeding station – where the film showed her stirring a large cauldron of "porridge", a hot maize meal now provided to 420,000 children every day in Malawi. "Mary's Meals is such a wonderfully simple idea," Lennox said. "It costs just £6.15 per child per year to provide a hot meal once a day, an incentive to come to school and be strong enough to learn. And it involves the whole community in cooking up the porridge. "It's a brilliant example of how the Scotland–Malawi partnership is working. We've got to keep this partnership going. Five years ago, we all came to Edinburgh to make a commitment to make poverty history. We've got to see that commitment through. This could be a beacon, a model, for partnership throughout the world."Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
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