By Tian Johnson, African Alliance
The decision by the United States government to retreat from public recognition of World AIDS Day, and to withhold the release of its annual HIV data, is being treated globally as a political earthquake.
But World AIDS Day was not created in a US government office and it does not depend on a White House proclamation to exist.
It was built from the grief of communities, from the organising of activists, and from the insistence that people living with HIV had the right to be remembered, treated and heard.
From our blood, from our pain, from the violence that we felt as a result of stigma. When communities hated us, when clinics shunned us, when our governments criminalised us.
The trap is to ask why the United States is stepping back. The real question is why Africa should ever have depended on Washington to light a candle, publish a number or acknowledge our losses.
Africa’s story is larger than the silence of any foreign capital. Our continent has carried the weight of this epidemic in our hospitals, families, budgets and burial grounds.
What matters is not that the United States has gone quiet. What matters is that Africa refuses to. Our voices do not require validation from a donor who can choose silence when the politics shift.
An African ritual of remembrance and resistance
For African communities, World AIDS Day is not symbolic. It is the day we name our dead out loud and recount the victories they fought for. It is when we measure whether our governments are keeping their promises. It is when young organisers hear their history and understand that they are inheriting a movement, not a tragedy.
The global narrative often forgets that Africa built its own pillars of this movement.
The Treatment Action Campaign and others used marches and litigation to force the government to do what science and humanity demanded. Community health workers kept people alive long before governments provided proper treatment. Networks of women living with HIV documented abuses when no national database would.
The United States can fall silent but it cannot rewrite this truth: Africa remembers, and Africa organises.
Africa’s future depends on African data, not donor politics
Africa’s HIV progress was never a donor miracle.
It was the ability to produce and defend our own evidence. South Africa’s first national survey in 2002, conducted in the midst of government denialism, exposed the scale of the crisis and shattered the political myth that HIV was an invention.
That survey, and the data systems that followed, helped drive treatment to nearly six million people and contributed to a decline in daily infections from roughly 1 460 in 2000 to just over 400 two decades later.
Data did not save lives by sitting in a spreadsheet. Data saved lives by forcing power to confront reality.
That same logic fuels the work many of us continue across the continent.
At the African Alliance, we gather evidence that governments often overlook and donors frequently underestimate. Our HIV Cureiculum and our community pandemic prevention preparedness and response (PPPR) tools support a continent that wants to shape science rather than simply receive it. Our partnerships across Kenya, Zambia, South Africa and beyond serve one purpose: to make sure that African data and African voices remain central to decision-making.
If a donor chooses silence, the remedy is not to beg for its voice. The remedy is to deepen our own.
US withdrawal is a vacuum, not a verdict
Many are interpreting the United States retreat as a sign that global commitment is collapsing. That is a narrow reading of a wider political moment.
Yes, the United States remains the world’s largest bilateral HIV funder. Yes, the shrinking of its public commitment has consequences. But the global response will not be endangered by the absence of a press release. It will be endangered if Africa fails to build its own accountability ecosystem.
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This moment invites a continental reset. African governments can no longer rely on donors to define success. The African Union and Africa CDC have matured into institutions capable of shaping HIV, PPR and health financing agendas. Regional bodies have begun coordinating procurement, surveillance and community feedback systems. Civil society networks and community groups have developed their own evidence bases, and they have done so without waiting for donor permission.
The danger is not that the United States has gone quiet. The danger is that some African governments may find this silence convenient. The withdrawal of donor scrutiny can easily become an excuse for weak monitoring, for slow programme delivery and for shrinking civic space. The contradiction is obvious.
While donors pull back from transparency, African communities continue to generate the very data that makes accountability possible.
What we must not do is inherit the silence of others. Our dead deserve more. Our future demands more.
The next chapter of the HIV response must be written in Africa
The lesson of the last four decades is simple. When power retreats, movements rise. When governments delay, communities mobilise. When data is hidden, evidence is produced from the ground up.
The world may be entering an age of donor fatigue but Africa is not entering an age of surrender. We are entering an age of data sovereignty, political clarity and community intelligence.
Africa will commemorate World AIDS Day because it is ours.
Africa will publish data because our lives depend on it.
Africa will continue the fight because the movement that was born in grief has grown into a continental demand for dignity.
The United States may choose silence. Africa chooses memory, evidence and justice.
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Tian Johnson is the founder and strategist of the African Alliance, a Pan African health justice organisation working across the continent to advance community-led science, accountability and dignity in public health.
The views and opinions expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author, who is not employed by Health-e News. Health-e News is committed to presenting diverse perspectives to enrich public discourse on health-related issues.
