Do you know your "celanthropists" from your celebrities? And time to deliver on HIV/AIDS at Toronto mega-conference...

It's been a big couple of weeks for "celanthropists", as Time magazine labels them. These days it seems philanthropy is a must-have string to the bow of super-league celebs. And hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and singer Madonna are the latest to join the "celanthropist" club.

It's certainly unusual to see a hip-hop star focus on water rather than Cristal (champagne). Jay-Z has teamed up with MTV and the United Nations to raise awareness about water shortages around the world. He will use his next tour starting in September to visit poor countries lacking clean water and plans to narrate an MTV documentary, "Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life", which will be aired on Nov. 24.

"As I started looking around and looking at ways I can become helpful, it started with water. Something as simple as water," said Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter. "Young people need to know the problem exists."

At the partnership launch, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan pointed out that more than 1 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, with nearly 2 million dying each year due to unclean water and poor sanitation - many more than from wars.

As for Madonna, her chosen cause is children in Malawi. She plans to raise at least $3 million for programmes to help orphans in a country she's yet to visit (although she's heading there this autumn with celebrity economist Jeffrey Sachs), and she's financing a documentary about the plight of Malawi's kids. Some of the cash will go to financing a "millennium village", which is part of an initiative spearheaded by Sachs to set up communities that provide a model for beating poverty.

Time magazine quotes the singer: "For the last few years - now that I have children and now that I have what I consider to be a better perspective on life - I have felt responsible for the children of the world ... I've been doing bits and bobs about it, and I suppose I was looking for a big, big project I could sink my teeth into."

Looks like she's found her project. But it seems there are more than a few sceptics. Time suggests that "the whole enterprise has the pungent aroma of a coordinated act of publicity".

And the Indo-Asian News Service reports that UNICEF turned down an offer to partner with Madonna's Raising Malawi charity because of its strong links with Kabbalah, the study of Jewish mysticism. According to Time, Raising Malawi's co-founder is Michael Berg, founder of the Kabbalah centre in Los Angeles.

The efforts of both Jay-Z and Madonna pale into comparison, however, next to the massive $500 million donation by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, announced this week.

The fund says it's short of cash as it has struggled to get money from rich countries in the five years since it was founded. The Gates' contribution is the largest private donation, but the fund's executive director says it'll still need an extra $500 million to be able to cover all the grants it wants to approve in its next round of funding.

Any more budding (and preferably super-rich) "celanthropists" out there?

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Time to deliver at Toronto AIDS conference

From Sunday, around 24,000 people will gather in Toronto for a huge international conference on HIV/AIDS, which is held every two years. If the last meeting in Bangkok is anything to go by, it'll be a lively affair, with activists mingling with scientists and policymakers, and making their views known in pretty colourful ways.

This year, the U.N.-backed mega-gathering is titled Time to Deliver, and aims to underline the urgency in bringing effective prevention and treatment programmes to all who need them. While scientific knowledge and measures to prevent new infections and prolong the lives of those living with HIV/AIDS already exist, that expertise still needs to be translated into more widely available HIV treatment and prevention programmes, especially in poor countries.

According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, the focus areas for the conference are:

• Combining management of the HIV/AIDS crisis with "a long-term sustainable response" (ensuring funding and keeping AIDS on the political agenda)
• The need to step up HIV prevention efforts around the globe
• Making sure available funding reaches those who need it most, and progressing towards the goal of universal access to HIV prevention, treatment and support
• The need to focus on women and girls within the AIDS response

This year is the 25th anniversary since AIDS was first identified. In an interview about the conference on the UNAIDS website, Peter Piot, its executive director, said rather than looking back it was important the conference looked ahead to the next 25 years and beyond.

"This means we need to start addressing the drivers of the epidemic - gender inequality, stigma and discrimination, homophobia, extreme poverty - in a much more concerted way," he explains. "If we don't we will never be able to advance faster and better within the response. While AIDS remains exceptional, at the same time we have to ensure that it is at the core of the development agenda."

At next week's conference, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) aims to highlight what's called the "feminisation" of HIV/AIDS, especially among young people. Here are a few stats:

• In some regions of the world, up to three-quarters of young people (aged 15-24) living with HIV are female
• 76 percent of all HIV-positive women live in sub-Saharan Africa
• 51 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean are women
• In Asia, the rate of female infection continues to rise, and women now account for 30 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS

Some of the conference sessions will focus on how effective interventions remain out of reach for millions of women and young people in the poorest countries. UNFPA will call for the need to link prevention to sexual and reproductive health, commodity security, mother-to-child transmission and vulnerable groups.

While it's impossible to list all the good stuff that'll be going on in Toronto, some of the interesting aspects include:

A 48-hour filmmaking competition, sponsored by the MTV-backed Staying Alive campaign, in which eight teams of filmmakers, who are also delegates at the conference, will be challenged to write, shoot and edit a whole film in two days. The films will be screened and judged by a panel including at least one MTV celebrity.

A "Global Village" that aims to involve marginalised communities and give people from the world's most-affected regions the opportunity to raise issues that matter to them. The space is open to delegates and non-delegates, and has networking zones, a youth pavilion, a programme of cultural activities and a marketplace showcasing HIV-specific income-generating projects from across the world.

A website and lots of sessions for young people attending the conference. You can also find blog entries from youth delegates online.

Every day, there will be webcasts of certain sessions, which you can watch here. You can also sign up for a daily email with news, summaries, webcasts and interviews from Toronto.

Expect plenty of international media attention on HIV/AIDS over the next week.

For starters, Reuters has published a couple of interesting features. One looks at the problems of accessing antiretroviral drugs in India (only 7 percent of HIV-positive Indians who need drugs get them free from the state), and another at how the epidemic is unfolding in South Africa.

Megan Rowling
AlertNet journalist