Paula Donovan '77: Friend of Africa

By Nina M. Riccio/Publications Writer

Nairobi, Kenya, "is a cosmopolitan and vibrant city," says Paula Donovan '77. "But it's set in a country on a continent that is wracked by AIDS, the greatest plague ever to hit the human race."

Donovan should know. She's spent the last 15 years involved in economic and social policy in developing countries, assessing and analyzing progress and trends to determine how nations can work together more efficiently to ameliorate some of Africa's basic problems. In the early 1990s, she worked at UNICEF and ran the global advocacy campaign for breastfeeding. The campaign coincided with the second worldwide boycott against Nestlé for falsely promoting baby formula as superior to breast milk. "But then it was discovered that HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) can be transmitted from mother to baby through breast milk, and temporarily anyway, the campaign came skidding to a halt," says Donovan wryly.

After that, Donovan became chief aide to UNICEF's deputy executive director, advocating for the rights of women and children in a world ravaged by extreme poverty, exposing a critical lack of education and the fact that children are dying from diseases that could be prevented for less than a dollar. And then there's AIDS. Donovan spent four years in Kenya as East and Southern Africa's Regional AIDS advisor for UNICEF, and later as Africa-wide AIDS advisor for the United Nations Development Fund for Women. "There are 12 million orphaned children on the continent, and only 3 percent of them have ever benefited, even once, from some kind of social service," she says, her voice betraying her frustration.

Because the health systems in Africa are completely overwhelmed and unable to cope with the effects of the epidemic, it's the women who care for family members who fall ill, filling the gap left by nurses, grief counselors, and pharmacies. When a generation dies, it's the women - often grandmothers - who raise the orphaned children. "For 20 years, they've been the unsung heroes of this tragedy," says Donovan. "These women are literally holding the continent together, and it's a thankless, depressing, and dangerous job. The more subtle effect of this crisis is that women's rights in these countries have been deterred because women are tethered to the home."

Because of the grave gender imbalance, she says, women - even educated women - are at a point where they have a mountain of obligations, but no rights. Yet making progress on women's rights at the U.N. was a painfully slow process. While still living in Kenya, Donovan left her full-time U.N. job to focus her attention on a personal project: In 2003, with the help of a small group of Kenyan women, she organized the first International Women's AIDS Run, a 10K race to acknowledge and thank the women of Africa and call attention to their situation. The race was a curtain raiser for the International AIDS Conference that was held in Nairobi that year; it featured several well-known Kenyan runners, as well as 11,000 others, and it has since become an annual event.

The former English major admits she wasn't particularly involved with social justice issues while at Fairfield University. "In those days, if there were campus ministry opportunities in the outside community, I wasn't aware of them," she says. "We felt pretty isolated from the world beyond campus. We were into partying and having fun." But her roommate and good friend, Madonna Sacco '77, now a trial attorney in Shelton, Conn., remembers things a bit differently. "Paula was always passionate about issues," she says. "In our early years at Fairfield, the talk was all about Watergate. Paula was very vocal and committed to getting Nixon out of office. We were focused on ourselves, but Paula was focused on others." Growing up, the Donovan parents instilled in their six children the expectation that living life well meant making a contribution, in whatever form, to society.

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"There's a certain intellectual attraction to being part of a movement, to righting wrongs," Donovan says.

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After graduation, Donovan taught in a poor section of Boston, then returned to Fairfield for her master's degree in communication. She worked for an anti-poverty program, Action for Bridgeport Community Development (ABCD), and decided to stay in the nonprofit sector. "There's a certain intellectual attraction to being part of a movement, to righting wrongs," Donovan says by way of explanation. That commitment to righting wrongs is one of the reasons Donovan was selected to receive Fairfield University's Martin Luther King Jr. Vision Award this past January. "Paula is brilliant, a fighter, and a highly principled person with a wonderful sense of humor. There should be more people in the world who care so deeply about things," says Sacco, who attended the awards ceremony and marveled once again at the ease with which her friend was able to speak about such difficult issues. "She's powerful without being shrill."

Today, Donovan is back home in Gloucester, Mass., but is no less involved with Africa. She works as senior advisor to the U.N. Secretary-General's Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian U.N. ambassador and one of the foremost experts in the world on the AIDS humanitarian crisis in Africa. She returns to Africa regularly and has spoken to international groups the world over.

On the subject of anti-retroviral drugs for those infected with HIV, Donovan is particularly passionate. "The amount of money Americans spend on ice cream per year is enough to get anti-retroviral drugs to everyone in Africa who needs them," she says, speaking of the combination of medicines that can turn AIDS from a fatal disease into a chronic one. "We've got to get past the overwhelming statistics and try to understand how the lives of regular people are torn to shreds by this disease. When people understand, they want to help; they find ways to make things better." Sometimes, she explains, the solutions to overwhelming problems are relatively easy. By way of example, she notes that "it's woefully easy for a mother to transmit HIV to her baby, yet transmission can be cut in half by giving a single dose of medicine to both the mother and child." Unfortunately, only 10 percent of the women who need this care have access to it.

An educational institution like Fairfield, Donovan insists, has both the opportunity and the obligation to release graduates who are aware of the challenges in the world around them and who recognize their responsibility to become engaged with these issues. "Not understanding the enormity of the AIDS crisis is as unconscionable as graduating a student in 1946 who knew nothing of the Holocaust," she says. "Yet because the worst effects of this crisis are confined to the poorest areas of the world, weeks go by without a mention in the news. It's as if World War II was being waged and the newscasters weren't picking it up. We need to take control of the direction of this crisis, and that begins with education."