The UK has announced an extra £100 million budget to fight HIV and AIDS in Nigeria. Minister for International Development, Ivan Lewis, disclosed this, saying the new six-year Enhancing Nigeria's Response to HIV and AIDS, ENR, programme will reach out to improve access to prevention, treatment, care and support services to those most vulnerable to HIV infection.

The ENR programme will reach 27 million young people with HIV and safer sex messages, and will use 1.2 billion condoms to reduce the number of new infections by 50,000 every year. The Department for International Development, DFID, will work with the National Agency for the Control of AIDS, NACA, as part of the special relationship between the two organisations in Nigeria.

The Nigerian national average of HIV prevalence has gone from 5.8 per cent in 2001, to 4.4 per cent in 2005, to the latest figure of 3.6 per cent. This is because of a national and state wide drive which has included a package of preventative programmes and activities including the scale up of counselling and testing, better education and public awareness, more accurate information and also greater access to anti-retroviral treatment, care and support. But, Nigeria has the second highest number of people living with HIV in the world. Over three million people are HIV positive and one million children have been orphaned by the disease. Since it was formed in 2000, NACA has increasingly focussed its efforts on becoming more strategic and co-ordinated in its response to the epidemic. This compliments the commitment DFID has made across health, education and other sectors in Nigeria, to strengthen programmes to fight HIV.