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Fighting AIDS in Africa
Creating pharmaceutical self-sufficiency
"What do I want to do with my life," Rolande Hodel asked herself. The answer came when she heard about efforts to contain AIDS. But deciding on a mission is one thing, and figuring out how to tackle such an enduring, widespread health issue is another.
Think of someone with a PhD in chemistry, and you’ll probably conjure an image of a scientist clad in a lab-coat, toiling away at a university or on a sprawling corporate campus. But after Rolande Hodel received her doctorate in chemistry, she knew neither of those roles would suit her.
“I asked myself a basic question,” Rolande recalled, “What do I want to do with my life?” The answer came to her when she attended a speech at the United Nations in which she heard about efforts to contain the AIDS epidemic in Brazil, where the pharmaceutical industry was beginning to produce affordable AIDS drugs.“When I heard that speech,” she said, “I knew I wanted to use my background to make a difference in this area.”
As her community project in her Self-Expression and Leadership Program, Hodel launched AIDSfreeAFRICA. The basic framework of her mission came to her quickly — Africa, where 8,500 people die of AIDS every day, would be the focus, and the goal would be to empower Africans to become self-sufficient in producing pharmaceuticals. But as Hodel soon learned, deciding on a mission is one thing and actually figuring out how to go about tackling one of this century’s most enduring and widespread health problems is something else altogether. A friend gave her a simple — yet valuable — piece of advice.
“He told me, ‘You need a community to pull this off,’” she recalls. “It was like a light bulb went off.”
Since then, AIDSfreeAFRICA has successfully negotiated with pharmaceutical companies in Belgium and other countries to supply needed medications, worked to remodel a facility that is slated to become a drug manufacturing center, and ensured that all the legal groundwork is in place for the manufacture of drugs. Hodel has traveled to Africa several times to assess local needs.
Rolande knows that she faces an uphill battle when it comes to AIDS in Africa. But in founding AIDSfreeAFRICA, she believes she has helped to establish a roadmap for battling the disease, one that starts with empowerment and self-sufficiency. After all, as the mission statement of the organization states, “Give people a fish and they eat for a day, teach them to fish and they will never go hungry.”
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