Carla Bruni, ambassadrice contre le sida

UN partners with Italian foundation to promote AIDS education in Africa

UN News Center, 5 December 2007 – Hundreds of thousands of students in four southern African countries stand to benefit from HIV and AIDS prevention education thanks to a new partnership between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Italy’s Fondazione Virginio Bruni Tedeschi.

The agreement, signed at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters today, includes $1.7 million in funding for an HIV/AIDS prevention education project in Angola, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland for two years.

Southern Africa is among the regions hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with infection rates as high as 30 per cent among adults. The new initiative will help provide prevention education programmes and materials to some 100,000 students in each of the target countries.

Nearly 100 schools and a thousand teachers will be involved in the initiative, which will also include activities related to reducing stigmatization of HIV-positive people.

UNESCO notes that while studies have shown that the mere fact of attending school provides protection against the disease, there is often a lack of classes focusing on HIV/AIDS for children in school.

As the UN agency specializing in education, UNESCO is the lead organization for EDUCAIDS, an initiative by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) implemented by a number of countries to promote HIV/AIDS education. The agency assists governments in improving their educational systems to ensure quality education on HIV/AIDS and in providing assistance to communities most exposed to the epidemic.

Created in February of this year, the foundation honours the memory of Virginio Bruni Tedeschi, an Italian graphic designer who died of cancer in July 2006.

Model Life
By Barry Didcock
Carla Bruni has gone from the runways to the recording studio, but what gives this Italian star her drive to succeed?
Sunday Herald, excerpt

For No Promises, her second album, Bruni has written music to accompany a series of poems by Emily Dickinson, WH Auden, WB Yeats, Dorothy Parker, Christina Rosetti and Walter de la Mare. It sounds fantastically pretentious - and very French - but again she makes it work.

She sings in English this time and if there's a unifying theme to her chosen poems it lies in her subconscious, she thinks. In other words she can't put a name to it. But she's aware that all three of the women writers led lonely lives and that many of them deal with ageing.

The choice of poems was very deliberate, however. "Yeats wrote some wonderful poems that are like beautiful songs but sometimes you can feel the man behind them and they would be hard for a woman to sing," she explains. "So the poems I chose are the ones that were the most simple to me and which I understood right away."

It's a sombre album with a sombre coda: it is dedicated to the memory of her brother, Virginio Bruni Tedeschi, a graphic designer who died of cancer in July 2006. "He was seven years older than me," she says. "I never knew the world without him. He was ill for a long time, about 10 years. But then he got this very bad lymphoma which killed him in two weeks. His wife was at the hospital when he died. He died in her arms."

Request for proposal, Excerpt
Terms of Reference
Daily Media Monitoring for UNAIDS Secretariat

Created in February of this year, the foundation honours the memory of Virginio Bruni Tedeschi, an Italian graphic designer who died of cancer in July 2006.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, porte-voix des victimes du sida
Le Figaro, 02/12/2008 | Mise à jour : 07:50, extrait

La première dame est devenue lundi ambassadrice mondiale pour la protection des mères et des enfants contre le sida.

[...] Dans la petite salle de presse de l'hôtel Marigny, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy s'est présentée devant une cinquantaine de journalistes sobrement vêtue d'un tailleur-pantalon noir, l'insigne rouge des campagnes contre le sida accroché au revers de sa veste. «Je ne m'engage pas par hasard. Ce que je fais aujourd'hui est le prolongement de quelque chose que j'ai déjà fait avec ma famille, et je suis heureuse de pouvoir aller beaucoup plus loin grâce à cette mission d'ambassadrice», a-t-elle expliqué d'emblée. Une allusion à la Fondation Virginio Bruni-Tedeschi, lancée en mémoire de son frère mort du sida. «Le monde malheureusement s'est habitué au sida. On n'y voit plus un scandale ou une urgence. Dans de nombreux pays, il faut encore dédiaboliser le sida», a-t-elle également regretté, sous les yeux de sa mère, Marisa Bruni-Tedeschi, ainsi que de Pierre Bergé ou Line Renaud, très investis dans la lutte contre la maladie.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy a indiqué qu'elle souhaitait intervenir sur le terrain, sans préciser pour le moment la date d'un déplacement particulier. Elle entend aussi «mobiliser les artistes» autour d'événements musicaux. Elle veut, enfin, s'appuyer sur son statut d'épouse de président «en utilisant les rencontres exceptionnelles que m'offre ma nouvelle position», a-t-elle ajouté. En virtuose des relations avec la presse, elle a remercié «les journalistes et les médias» qui lui portent «une attention régulière et constante», et elle les a exhortés à «diriger leur attention sur quelque chose de beaucoup plus important»…