Development & Aid, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Health

HEALTH: New AIDS Group Focuses on Women

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb 2 2004 (IPS) - A global initiative will seek to put women at the heart of new projects to fight AIDS.

"Women are still very marginal when it comes to responses to AIDS," United Nations under secretary-general Peter Piot said at the launch of the initiative in London Monday. "They should be absolutely central."

The new Global Coalition on Women and AIDS will be an "informal group of individuals, organisations and networks to raise awareness of women’s issues in relation to AIDS, document facts and catalyse action," said Piot, who is also executive director of UNAIDS, the United Nations programme to battle AIDS.

Of the estimated 40 million suffering from AIDS, half are women, Piot said. "But in Africa, 60 percent are women," he said. "Teenage girls are two-and-a-half times more likely to be infected than boys of their age; and they have not been infected by boys but by older men."

The initiative is being launched amidst findings that sexual fidelity is no protection against HIV for women; studies show higher rates of infection by husbands and long-term partners. Recent studies have shown also that four out of five young women in the worst-hit countries do not know enough about AIDS.

Executive director of the Ethical Globalisation Initiative and former Irish president Mary Robinson, Oscar-winning British actress Emma Thompson and national HIV/AIDS coordinator for the British charity ActionAid in Kenya Ludfine Anyango came together for the launch of the coalition.

The coalition has not produced a plan for what exactly it proposes to do, but it will be "action oriented, and not a talking shop coalition," Robinson said. Broad plans include campaigning with pharmaceutical companies, with aid programmes, with governments, health workers and independent groups to steer the focus of prevention and treatment programmes towards women.

UNAIDS will provide administrative support for the coalition, but it is "not a bureaucratic new procedure," Piot said. "We will be using the network of individuals and organisations present in the coalition to change the emphasis that AIDS is an issue primarily for men, or for gay men."

A change in communication methods will be a vital tool in a change of emphasis, said Thompson. "When I first started working for a non-governmental organisation I was drowned in acronyms and ‘developmentese’. That kind of thing is very off-putting to the public, and there can be no large change without a large number of people behind it."

Single-sex meetings followed by joint meetings held in some places in Uganda recently have been "fantastically successful", Thomson said. "The discussions led to a lessening of violence because people were communicating," said Thomson who returned recently from a visit to Uganda and Mozambique to look at AIDS-related issues among women.

The profile of speakers at the launch raised some concerns that this will be seen as another Western-driven initiative ‘talking down’ to people in Africa. "But as long as we are open to what people on the ground are saying, we will be safe from accusations of lecturing," Thompson said.

Robinson said the coalition will help build "real linkages with women living with HIV and AIDS" and that "we will all listen to one another."

A steering committee comprising 28 people involved with AIDS initiatives has been set up to direct the efforts of the coalition.

The committee includes members such as Musimbi Kanyoro, secretary-general of the World Young Women Christian Association (YMCA) from Kenya, Justice Edwin Cameron from South Africa, Asma Jahangir, lawyer and special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights from Pakistan, Marta Suplicy, mayor of Sao Paulo in Brazil and Iman Bibars, chairperson of the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women in Cairo.

The coalition is not leaving men out, and hopes to address some deep-rooted prejudices. Piot pointed to a campaign in the Caribbean where women have gone collectively to the houses of men who have beaten up their wives.

"There was a shaming element here," he said. "We will be trying to give out messages that to do this kind of thing is socially not cool, that you can feel better as a man if you do not do these things."

Anyango who has been living with HIV infection for the past eight years said the coalition could above all bring hope to women. "I am a good example of what hope can do," she said. "I have done my post-graduate education living with the virus. I did not despair, and it is because I was given hope that I am here before you."

Coalition members acknowledged that many of the efforts to focus the fight against AIDS on women will have to be social and political.

A study in Zambia showed that only 11 percent of women believed they had a right to ask the husband to use a condom even if he had proven himself to be unfaithful and was HIV-positive, the coalition said in a note.

Violence was another danger, the coalition warned. In Cameroon, the Caribbean, Peru and South Africa, between 20 and 48 percent of girls aged 10 to 25 reported that their first sexual encounter was forced.

The focus of the coalition will be preventing HIV infection among girls and young women, and other steps affecting women and girls like reducing violence, protecting property and inheritance rights, ensuring equal access to care and treatment, supporting improved community-based care, promoting access to new prevention options including microbicides, and supporting efforts towards universal education for girls.