Tewodros says the conference will emphasize that the 22.5 million Africans with HIV/AIDS are people whose lives and deaths touch millions more.

"I told you the figures, these are not really numbers, they are people," Tewodros noted. "Twenty-two million in Africa is really big, and the extent, the magnitude of death is really huge, and if there is real commitment, there is no reason we cannot show or maintain the commitment we had started."

The International Conference on AIDS and sexually transmitted infections in Africa, known as ICASA, will be the biggest conference ever staged in Addis Ababa.

The city's massive Millennium Hall, built five years ago for celebrations of the Ethiopian calendar year 2000, is being transformed into a convention center for the event.

Officials say the facility will have a capacity of up to 35,000 people in 14 separate parallel sessions, making it one of Africa's largest convention centers.