Former US President Bill Clinton is due in Kenya on Friday to see how the HIV/AIDS pandemic is affecting children in the east African nation.

Clinton, who began a weeklong six-nation tour of Africa last weekend, is scheduled to launch a major initiative to counter HIV infections among children in the country and meet Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.

The former US president, whose tour is aimed at boosting the work of his foundation in combating the scourge on the continent, reportedly said he admired the ruling coalition government's free education policy.

Officials at the Clinton Foundation in Kenya said the tour spanned across Mozambique, Lesotho, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda.

The Clinton Foundation's work in Africa has concentrated on helping governments design and implement AIDS treatment programs, with a special focus on children, rural areas and widening access to affordable AIDS drugs.

His foundation is spending some 10 million dollars on AIDS- affected children this year, mainly in rural Africa.

His final stop will be Rwanda, where the number of known infections rose particularly among women -- a result, experts believes, of the multiple rapes that accompanied the 1994 genocide.

According to the United Nations AIDS program, sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than 60 percent of people around the world living with HIV.

In 2004, an estimated 3.1 million people in the region became newly infected.

In the countries where it has direct involvement, the Clinton Foundation aims to get 300,000 people on treatment by the end of this year, with the goal of raising that figure to between one and two million by 2008.

Source: Xinhua