Cape Town – Prince Harry is keeping his mother’s legacy alive in the ongoing fight against HIV and AIDS.
The British royal has teamed up with one of his mother’s close friends, Sir Elton John to launch the MenStar coalition - a new $1.2bn global organisation aimed at helping men break the HIV cycle through testing & treatment with the ultimate goal of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030.
During a plenary session at the 2018 International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam on Tuesday, Harry announced that he, along with all the coalition’s partners including Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Ndaba Mandela, “must work together across agencies, charities, and industries to make change at scale” by providing “new, energetic and innovative solutions.”
Harry added that “inspired by the growing alarm at the rate of new HIV infections among young women, the MenStar coalition is bravely tackling the root cause of this problem — the lack of awareness of HIV prevention amongst hard-to-reach young men.”
WATCH A CLIP OF HARRY’S SPEECH HERE:
Elton added: ‘We cannot solve the whole problem if we’re only addressing half the situation. If we want to win this fight, if we want to end AIDS once and for all, we must make men part of the solution.”
Also at the conference in Amsterdam was Charlize Theron, who was recently in South Africa visiting sites affiliated by the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project.
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The South African beauty represented the charitable organisation during an open chat with Award winning activist and HIV campaigner, Mercy Ngulube as well as Austrian singer and artist, Conchita Wurst.