HIV/AIDS Policy Compendium

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER

In August of 1997 The Futures Group International (FUTURES) posted a notice on several AIDS-related listservs requesting assistance in col- lecting "materials for use in preparing national AIDS policies." The resulting international compendium of HIV/AIDS policies contains over 2400 annotated citations to 91 source policy documents from over 50 countries. The following is a brief description of the compendium and includes information on its availability.

FUTURES, under its POLICY Project, conducted a detailed and wide- ranging search to identify and collect all existing HIV/AIDS policies. New comprehensive national HIV/AIDS policies and laws will be added to the compendium, as they become available. We encourage and welcome do- nations of material for the database.

Contents

The Policy Compendium contains documents describing national policies or international resolutions. The aim is to collect comprehensive na- tional HIV/AIDS policies and laws, but the compendium also includes na- tional strategy documents, national program plans, and medium-term plans. Such documents do not strictly qualify as policy statements; however, the relevant policy-related wording (text) from these docu- ments has been extracted and included in the compendium.

Availability
The HIV/AIDS Policy Compendium is available in three formats:

It can be accessed via the internet at:
http://www.tfgi.com/areas/hivaids.htm

It is available on CD-ROM that includes a runtime version of Microsoft Access. This will allow users who have Windows 95 or Windows NT to run the database on their personal computers. It can be requested on a diskette with a zipped file of the database for use with Microsoft Ac- cess. The database file is in Access

Searching the Database

Two search forms are available to use. One is a Topic Search that al- lows selection from the 34 topics with the option of combining a coun- try selection (or just searching for a country selection). The second form is a Full Text Search, which finds words or phrases in the policy statement text.

More detailed information and a list of contributors are available from:

http://209.27.118.9/aids2/

For more information, please contact:

Kay Willson
The Policy Project
The Futures Group Intl.
80 Glastonbury Blvd.
Glastonbury CT 06033, USA
Tel: +1-860-633-3501 ext. 285
Fax: +1-860-657-9701 or 657-3918
mailto:k.willson@tfgi.com

Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar