Welcome to the first edition of our bi-monthly newsletter WWW E-News.  For those of you who don’t know much about the campaign, in brief the Women WON’T wait. End HIV and Violence Against Women. Now (WWW) campaign is an international coalition of organizations and networks working to promote women's health and human rights in the struggle to address HIV and AIDS and end all forms of violence against women and girls.  As a campaign we have focused our advocacy efforts to hold donors and governments responsible to basic health and human rights standards in their policies, programmes, and funding streams.  Please check out the website (www.womenwontwait.org) for more detail on this.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Whilst we recognise and celebrate the 60 years of work to secure the human rights framework, we are also cognisant of the fact that the implementation and resources to fulfil on the promise of these frameworks still leaves a lot to be desired.

Horror stories coming out of Zimbabwe have today become commonplace. Each day a new twist emerges. Social services have shut down. Schools no longer work. There is no water. Hundreds are dying from cholera, an illness that is both preventable and curable. The economic system no longer functions. People are locked out of access to their own money and thus a means to buy basic goods including food.

At its meeting last month, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria Board adopted a new Gender Equality Strategy, the full title of which is "The Global Fund's Strategy for Ensuring Gender Equality in the Response to HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria." The strategy is available under "Addendum to Report of PSC: The Gender Equality Strategy" at www.theglobalfund.org/en/board/meetings/eighteenth/documents.

On the 17th of December we will be commemorating the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, a day when all of the globe, sex worker rights organisations will be staging actions and vigils to raise awareness about violence that is commonly committed against sex workers.  To coincide with this event, the Open Society Institute releases a report which finds that sex workers in Southern Africa experience widespread human rights abuses.