Inviolata Mmbwavi is the national coordinator of the Network of People Living with HIV/Aids in Kenya. She is HIV positive herself and in Edinburgh to highlight what she calls the "social ills linked to poverty" - lack of access to education, and lack of access to medicines.
This is also what she does in Kenya, but there it is not some of the most powerful in the world she is trying to persuade of the link, but some of the poorest. Ms Mmbwavi is in Scotland with the charity ActionAid, who sent a bus from Johannesburg to Edinburgh to collect messages from the people of Africa to the leaders of the G8. The bus arrived in the Scottish capital today, and you can see some images from the film here.
Her role was to mobilise local communities and civil society groups to welcome the bus, and to understand the difficulties in their lives were essentially political - the consequence of policies from international trade to drug licencing that someone, somewhere down the line, had one day chosen.
While these were messages to G8 governments, Ms Mmbwavi believes that Kenyans and other Africans need to put pressure on their own governments if they are to build a better future. In Kenya this is beginning to happen, she says - a new government is in power and voters are refusing to have their ballots bought for food handouts. In the cities, she says, the political climate is changing as MPs no longer return to their constituencies and boast of the funds they are spending there, but voters hold them to account and ask why they are not spending the money better.
"If they don't deliver, we can empower the community and vote them out. I have a feeling this would improve their performace," she says.
In a first for Kenya, the new government is publishing full details of the budget. Tax collection is also up. But while there is much that is positive there is much that is not. Healthcare can be a eight or nine mile walk away, says Ms Mmbwavi, and it is not unknown for people to die making the journey.
The messages to G8 leaders in the film also reveal the simple limitations that poverty places on the lives of ordinary people. "We want to go to school," say children from Mozambique. "Why are we still poor?" ask others
The messages are to the G8 leaders but, you cannot help thinking, to the citizens of G8 nations too. Amanda Sserumaga, country director for ActionAid in Uganda, reminds an Edinburgh audience that the people in the film are not that different to anyone in the room. "They are poor, but they have the same aspirations as you. They want their children educated, and they want to work their way out of poverty."
But it is not getting easier. Ms Sserumaga tells the audience about her grandmother, who was born in 1900 and died in 1987. "She had the expectation her children would outlive her," she says. Average life expectancy in Uganda is now 42.
