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Advocacy is at the root of every piece of good news associated with HIV/AIDS: the fact that anti-retroviral therapy, which was available only to the wealthiest a decade ago, is now prolonging the lives of close to two million people in developing countries; the fact that the need for children’s versions of those drugs, believed extravagant just a few years ago, has made its way onto the international agenda and stayed there; the fact that the care-related duties of women, whose share of the AIDS burden never stops climbing, have finally been acknowledged (if not yet relieved).... Examples of successful advocacy abound. With the launch of our website, we’re calling for more.

The following statement was issued from Nigeria, where AIDS-Free World’s Co-Directors joined other grantees of the Ford Foundation in Abuja to address issues of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

With predictable fidelity to the UN’s lamentable record on the rights of women, a recommendation for a new international women’s agency, submitted to the General Assembly by a High-Level Panel on UN reform, has been mired in a swamp of bureaucratic inertia and sovereign indifference since its formal submission on November 9, 2006.

The Board speaks out

AIDS-Free World Chairperson Allan Rosenfield, M.D. and Linda Carrier-Walker, Advisory Board Treasurer, issued a joint statement to participants at the Women Deliver global conference on maternal health in London, England appealing for urgent action to create an international agency for women.
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Call for a new UN initiative to end sexual violence in the eastern region of the DRC

Press conference statement (Nairobi, Kenya)

On Monday of this week, John Holmes, the UN Emergency Coordinator and Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs returned from a trip to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and characterized sexual violence against women as "almost unimaginable". He termed it a "weapon of terror", adding that the intensity and frequency is worse than anywhere else in the world.

Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, Colorado

As we meet here, in Aspen, Colorado, discussing ideas that can change the world, there is another meeting taking place, of far greater import, in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s the International Women’s Summit, the first ever global conference on women and AIDS, sponsored by the World YWCA, comprising 1,500 women activists and a gaggle of UN and political leaders all gathered for the purpose of confronting the appalling feminization of the AIDS pandemic.

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The proof is in the dying

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SPEAKING UP
A regular column reacting to HIV news and developments. From AIDS-Free World’s Director of Communications Sohaila Abdulali:
THE DEBATES
Every approach to HIV/AIDS has pros and cons, but most are thrashed out behind closed doors. In The Debates, introduced here with a few initial topics, we’ll move those discussions into the public domain.
- A UN agency for women
- Questioning the statistics

THE AGENDA
AIDS-Free World takes on the most critical issues affecting populations from Africa to the Caribbean, Asia and beyond. The Agenda items listed so far offer a sampling of topics we will probe in this section.
UN WOMEN'S AGENCY
People want and deserve to be kept informed about the newly approved UN women's agency, now under construction. Follow AIDS-Free World's written exchanges with the UN Deputy Secretary-General, and check this spot for news about the global search for the woman who will lead the new agency, and other developments as they unfold.