“If you have a very big elephant and you want to eat it up, you start from all corners. That way you’€™ll finish it up.” So says Edith Mukisa, the founder of Uganda’€™s Teenage HIV/AIDS Clinic in Naguru, just outside the capital Kampala.

This is the philosophy that lies at the core of Uganda’€™s multi-sectoral response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. And it’€™s paying dividends.

Twenty years ago Uganda was regarded as the epicentre of the epidemic. The disease, known only as “slim”, was claiming thousands of lives, leaving thousands more children orphaned. Some 30 percent of the population have died of AIDS. But finally, the tide is turning against the killer disease, and HIV infection rates in some parts of Uganda have dropped from as high as 38% to as low as       10%.

The subject of sex and HIV/AIDS is no longer taboo. More people are voluntarily going to be tested, to find out their sero-status. But most significantly, Uganda’€™s youth — regarded as the country’€™s “windows of hope” — have started changing their behaviour.

Young men and women are waiting longer to have sex. When they do, it is usually with one partner. And if they embark on a more promiscuous lifestyle, then they use condoms which are widely available.

Joyce Kadowe of Uganda’€™s Aids Commission refers to it in terms of individual choice. “The only cure for AIDS is behaviour change,” she says. “You, yourself, you are the cure.”

In the absence of a medical cure or an anti-AIDS vaccine, Uganda has proved that it is possible to turn the tide against AIDS.

So how has the country done it? It took a combination of political courage on the part of President Yoweri Museveni to publicly acknowledge that Uganda faced a potential national disaster and to appeal to the international community for help. And it took the courage of committed individuals and grassroots organisations to de-stigmatise AIDS, to teach communities how to deal compassionately with the epidemic themselves, and to provide the necessary support for individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

The Straight Talk Foundation is one of the most successful programmes working with adolescents. Founder and editorial director Cathy Watson believes that peer-based education is the secret. She says both the Straight Talk and Young Talk newspapers, which are circulated among Uganda’€™s primary and secondary schools, reach children because adolescents set the agenda, and the messages are straightforward and very clear. The Foundation uses the same philosophy in its radio programmes that are shockingly direct.

Issues such as masturbation, premature ejaculation, periods, circumcision and other sensitive topics are openly discussed. Children are taught to know about and take responsibility for their sexuality. Watson believes that changing sexual behaviour becomes easier the younger one starts.

For more than 15 years the network of Uganda’€™s AIDS Information centres have not only offered a testing facility but have been running “Post-Test Clubs” consisting of groups of individuals who all took their HIV test at the same time. Some might have tested negative, while others tested positive. But the group continues to provide crucial support that may be lacking in the domestic or professional environment.

And the groups provide an educating role by performing dramas in rural areas where the level of hostility, suspicion and stigma is still high.

TASO, an AIDS support organisation is also one of Uganda’€™s precedent-setters in terms of providing counselling for people infected and affected by AIDS. Today it has 54 000 members countrywide, and provides a source of hope for people who feel they have nowhere else to turn.

There are many other innovative programmes, achieving varying measures of success, but they are all moving in the same direction. They are all “eating the elephant” together. There are few other countries in Africa which have approached the HIV/AIDS epidemic with such a degree of openness and honesty, which is why Uganda could become a role model for other developing countries where the epidemic has not yet peaked.