This was the first time that Kiarostami made a film outside his home country. Particularly sensitive to the cause of children rights as reflected throughout his film repertoire, Kiarostami has won the admiration of audiences and critics worldwide. He himself has been a member of the jury of Cannes Film Festival in 1993 and received the Palme d’Or in 1997 for the film ''The taste of the cherry''. He was also awarded the Special Prize of the Jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1999.

In Uganda, two million children – almost 20 percent of the population of children under 18 years of age - are orphans, having lost one or both parents to AIDS. The abilities of extended rural African families to care for these children are stretched to the limit because one out of every four families in Uganda is looking after at least one child orphaned by AIDS, and many care for ten or more.

With the technical expertise of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in microcredit and the financial support of the Belgian Survival Fund (BSF), the Ugandan Women’s Effort to Save Orphans (UWESO) - a grassroots non-governmental organisation – has helped 33,000 orphans and their adoptive families build promising futures with the help of microcredit which remains the key to unlocking the capacities vital to healing the wounds of lives and communities ravaged by AIDS.

The international community has recognised that poverty is one of the greatest threats to global well-being – political, economic and social. It has set the target of reducing the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty by half by 2015. The rate of poverty reduction in Africa is only 16% of the rate required to meet the 2015 targets. It means that at the current rate, major in-roads into African poverty and its consequences – misery, war and disease, will not be made.

The release of ''ABC Africa'' comes when UN Secretary-General Mr Kofi Annan, at the AIDS Summit recently convened in Abudja, declared the battle against AIDS as his ''personal priority'' and proposed a global super-fund to halt and reverse the disease, which kills 2.8 million people a year. His plan calls for financing from rich countries and private contributors, but also demands that poor nations give priority in their budgets to a comprehensive health system. The spread of AIDS in Africa has a great deal to do with the dislocations of normal lives, from the weakening of family stemming from migration to seek income, and from the poverty-induced consignment of women to commercial sex as a way of making a living. It is also shaped by gender relations, and the difficulties that poor women have in organising safe lives for themselves and their children. It can be contained by access to drugs widely available and used in rich countries – and by support to families and communities jeopardised by the loss of their economic backbone, prime age adults, and the savings that are rapidly depleted to care for the sick and compensate for the loss of earnings.

To the ABC of Kiarostami, the letter D – Development should be added. More support is required for the general development processes that contribute to the stabilisation of African families and communities, to the ability of Africans to invest in basic measures for the suppression and control of disease, and to the power of African women to take control of their own lives. More particularly the focus has to be on the African poor. It is they who suffer most from this affliction, and it is in a change in their condition that the solution lies: disease is the symptom; poverty is the cause.

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The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) – a Rome-based specialized agency of the United Nations - was established in 1977 with the unique mandate to combat hunger and rural poverty in the low-income food-deficit regions of the world and to improve the livelihoods of rural poor people on a sustainable basis. IFAD operates as an international financial institution (IFI), and approaches its mandate through financing innovative, cost-effective, and replicable projects that are designed to increase household food security through increasing productivity of on and off farm activities. IFAD was the first IFI to fund the groundbreaking Grameen Bank, the seminal microcredit institution of Bangladesh. IFAD has participated in roughly 300 projects with microcredit components and has committed over $1 billion in financial services and credit to the rural poor. This promotion of microcredit has benefited 20 million people directly and another 40 million people indirectly.

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The Belgian Survival Fund (BSF) was created in 1983 by the Belgian Government and endowed with $280 million to combat hunger and poverty. BSF operates primarily through a Joint Program with the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the United Nations Development Program with IFAD as lead agency.