“On the outskirts of Lusaka, I witnessed this miracle: A man with AIDS, who’d arrived at the clinic skeletal and hopeless, within weeks was triumphantly pushing his own wheelbarrow back home… Those who kissed death now embrace life, lifting wheelbarrows that had once been their hearse."

When AIDS activist Mary Fisher told that story in a packed Capitol Hill chamber in 2006, she gave the miracle a name: the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ). A non-governmental organization working in partnership with the Zambian government and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, CIDRZ has begun to turn the tide against AIDS in Zambia, where one in six people is HIV-positive.

To sustain and expand CIDRZ's work, its supporters have launched an ambitious capacity-building plan called ZAMBIA FIRST: A Campaign to Bring HIV/AIDS under Control, First, in the Republic of Zambia.

Since CIDRZ's creation in 1999, its Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission program has tested and served more than 450,000 Zambian women and their infants.  Its antiretroviral therapy (ART) program has enrolled more than 113,000 adults and children into long-term HIV/AIDS care, and started more than 70,000 on ART.  A Centers for Disease Control official hailed CIDRZ's ART program as "number one" among those funded by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). And since the ART program launched, Lusaka's overall mortality rate has declined by more than half. 

CIDRZ's early, dramatic success raises the prospect that Africa's HIV/AIDS pandemic may be brought to heel — in Zambia, first. But as CIDRZ has pursued miracles, it also has outgrown its facilities.  Its operations are hampered by the inefficiency of working out of four converted homes and apartments around Lusaka. To keep delivering and expanding its life-giving services, CIDRZ needs a single base for its operations, research, and care -- a center specifically designed to bring this disease under control.

Thus was born ZAMBIA FIRST. More than just a capital campaign, ZAMBIA FIRST seeks nothing less than to bring CIDRZ to scale with the HIV/AIDS epidemic – that is, to enable CIDRZ’s research, treatment and technology to move as fast as the virus moves. Armed with that capacity, CIDRZ aims to bring HIV/AIDS to heel in Zambia — and then share what it has learned with all Africa and the world.

Welcome to the ZAMBIA FIRST Web site. We invite you to learn more about our history and people, and our two-phase campaign to support a new vision of CIDRZ.