"The coming testing week has been planned following the success of a similar exercise last year when about 96,000 people got tested from the expected target of 50,000 people," Ngaunje said in the capital, Lilongwe, when she briefed the media on the forthcoming campaign.

The impoverished southern African country first came up with the HIV testing week from July 17 to 22, 2006 amid fears that intervention efforts to halt the spread of the virus could be heavily compromised as more Malawians were living with HIV without knowing.

Last year's HIV testing campaign came in the wake of revelations that only 15 percent of the country's population of about 13 million people had been tested for HIV yet there were about 6 million Malawians who were sexually active.

The minister said this year's HIV testing campaign, pegged at 1. 5 million U.S. dollars, would mainly focus on providing people living in rural areas, an opportunity to know their sero-status following recent revelations that HIV infection levels in the country's rural areas were still rising.

According to the 2007 UN Millennium Development Goals report released last week, Malawi's HIV infection rates in the rural areas were high while the country had realized declines in HIV prevalence in urban areas.

Malawi was the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to come up with a national HIV testing week, and received recognition as a commendable practice at a recent HIV/AIDS Implementers meeting in Rwanda.

Officials from Lesotho, Swaziland, Kenya and United Stats Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Global Fund would be arriving in the country to learn from this experience.

Malawi's first case of HIV was identified in 1985, and by 2005 the country had 930,000 people living with the virus, nine percent of whom were children below 14 years of age.

The country has presently managed to put about 80,000 infected people on free life prolonging drugs with assistance from the Global Fund Against Aids, Tuberculosis. Malawi currently has about 178,000 infected people who are in need of AIDS treatment.