Vitamin Water and Alicia Keys launch of Africa vs AIDS Johannesburg June 10th 2010
- click here to see Alicia's speech.
Africa vs. AIDS has engaged some of the Premiere League’s top footballers in support of the campaign, which features spectacular, instantly iconic visuals shot by the brilliant photographer, RANKIN (Nike, Dove, BMW, Adidas, Levi’s). RANKIN is completely committed to our cause and has photographed each footballer either kicking, heading, chesting, throwing or passing a dynamic glass football. Through the campaign, Keep a Child Alive (KCA) will:
- Provide an urgently-needed education and awareness campaign targeting men in conjunction with glaceau/vitaminwater in South Africa and;
- Provide a vehicle through which consumers in markets internationally can connect with the AIDS cause through football.
These images will be exhibited at the Glaceau pop-up gallery in Johannesburg until the end of the World Cup as well as on billboards throughout South Africa. Specifically aimed at the male audience, the messages delivered by these football superstars will be a vehicle through which we hope behaviors that lead to the spread of HIV can be changed. The players’ messages are as follows:
- Soloman Kalou: Get Tested Get Drugs
- Jermain Defoe: Don’t Bring HIV Home
- Aaron Mokoena: Virgins Can’t Cure AIDS
- John Paintsil: Every Orphan Is Your Child
- Benik Afobe: AIDS Drugs Work
- Djibril Cisse: Don’t Let AIDS Beat Africa
- Carlton Cole: Don’t Cheat
This year, the FIFA World Cup will bring South Africa to the forefront of the world’s media agenda for the first time since the end of apartheid era in 1994. A country long recognized as the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, South Africa has suffered from the extreme negligence of government officials whose failure to address the issue of AIDS for more than a decade resulted in the deaths of 330,000 of its people, most of them poor, and the destruction of the extended family unit as it existed for generations. As an organization created to provide AIDS treatment and care where it most urgently needed, Keep a Child Alive has a long established presence in South Africa, maintaining clinical, orphan care and child-rescue sites in Johannesburg and Durban. And in the platform of the World Cup, we recognized the enormous potential to bring the every day disaster of AIDS in South Africa to the world, using the players and power of football.
Keep a Child Alive is dedicated to providing life-saving anti-retroviral treatment, care and support services to children and families whose lives have been affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India by directly engaging the global public in the fight against AIDS. www.keepachildalive.org