CAS Graduate Pursuing More Effective Methods of Combating AIDS in Africa
By James Devitt
“I’ve never lived in a world without AIDS,” says Katherine Otto, who graduates today from the College of Arts and Science with an honors degree in international relations. “It’s treatable and preventable, but it is still ravaging the world and it doesn’t have to be.”
Though only 21, the Rhode Island native offers a broad and informed perspective on the pandemic. From volunteering at an AIDS hospice while in high school, when she also produced an AIDS awareness video that became part of the school system’s curriculum, to working on public education programs in Ghana and Tanzania, to writing an honors thesis on the efficacy of foreign aid to combat the disease, Otto’s knowledge of the issue has grown, but so has her understanding of the challenges blocking progress.
“I learned infinitely more about the social stigma associated with AIDS when I was in Africa,” explains Otto, who was enrolled at NYU’s Ghana campus in the spring of 2006 and was in Tanzania in the summer of 2007. “A lot of my work there was with young people who not only shared the same ideas but also the enthusiasm that things needed to be changed.”
In Ghana, Otto designed “Freedom for the Future,” a fund-raising program that brought AIDS education to more than 2,000 students, 250 of whom participated in a poster competition by illustrating ways to overcome stigmas associated with HIV/AIDS. The program raised over $10,000 for medical and education services, and Otto adapted it last summer in Tanzania, where she helped establish relationships between local schools and the government’s Ministry of Health.
Otto thinks that enhancing teenage sexual health education would help stem the spread of the disease on the continent. But she’s more certain about the value of foreign aid programs designed to combat HIV/AIDS in third-world nations: “They don’t work.”
Her honors thesis examined the impact of aid from the world’s biggest bi- and multi-lateral donors. Despite the massive AIDS-aid increase, she found that that HIV rates have continued to increase in many recipient nations, and that no significant correlation exists between changes in HIV rates and AIDS-specific aid. However, Otto’s statistical analysis revealed that under certain political and institutional conditions—low corruption, strong health infrastructure, and high women’s rights policies—AIDS-aid can be effective.
After working this summer at the World Bank, Otto will remain as director of the college program of the organization Keep a Child Alive, which provides medicine to children and their families with HIV/AIDS and aims to raise awareness. As recipient of a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, she will continue work on the issue as a graduate student this fall in the master’s program in health policy and management at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Katherine Otto
