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8 March, 2010. This International Women's Day, we not only mark the 3 year anniversary of the Women WON'T wait. End HIV and Violence Against Women. NOW. campaign, but also reflect on where we are since the historic 4th World Conference on Women in 1995. The Beijing Platform of Action contained milestone commitments to the world’s women, such as the possibility of a future where it was possible to end all forms of violence against women; women’s poverty and our unequal share of caring work within and outside the home; as well as socio-cultural discrimination, sexual disciplining, and political exclusions of various categories of people, including women. Fifteen years on, with persisting inequalities, particularly violence against women and girls as an important driver and consequence of the HIV epidemic, it is important for us to ask ourselves some critical questions regarding our strategies and struggles in pursuing women’s rights.
The evidence continue to show that women’s exposure to violence increases their vulnerability to HIV infection and positive women can become easy targets of violence for their real and perceived HIV status. The relationship between these two epidemics has many dimensions and thus many potential overlapping areas for intervention, i.e. any effort to address the HIV epidemic must take into account violence against women and girls and expand interventions to respond to both epidemics when they intersect.
As the Women WON'T wait. End HIV and Violence Against Women. NOW. campaign, we continue to stress that donors play a critical role in stemming the HIV epidemic. Since 2001, since the passing of the Declaration of Commitment was passed by the United Nations General Assembly with far reaching goals in prevention, treatment, care and support. Whilst these goals are nowhere near being achieved, new commitments are regularly being made at the global and national levels, the most recent being to achieve universal access to prevention, treatment, care and support by 2015. It is no secret that without resources accompanied by political will, these goals remain elusive.
The Women WON'T wait. End HIV and Violence Against Women. NOW. campaign has produced two reports since 2007, Show Us the Money and What Gets Measured Matters. Both of these reports examine five agencies: the global agenda setting agency on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, the two largest multilateral donors, the Global Fund and the World Bank, and the two largest bilateral donors, PEPFAR and DFID. Each year, the campaign updates progress made by each agency and offers a core set of recommended targets and indicators that donors can share with potential grantees to support them in developing programs that directly address the intersection between the violence against women and girls and HIV & AIDS.
So far, our research shows that there has been some distinct progress made by the large agenda setting and donor agencies such as The United Nations Joint Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS), the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) and the U.S. Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC), which manages the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in the direction of addressing the association between gender inequality and HIV/AIDS.
There remains, however, a distinct gap in the agenda as well as the funding when it comes to addressing the intersections between the epidemics of violence against women and girls and HIV. UNAIDS, GFATM and OGAC have released policy documents on addressing gender inequality which have the potential of outlining an architecture for gender-responsive HIV programs.
Some of the key challenges identified for all the donor agencies include (i) operationalising the policies with a clear human rights analysis and attention to violence against women; and (ii) monitoring and evaluation which includes the “minimum necessary” indicators for violence against women that moves beyond sex disaggregated data to capture how the intersection of violence against women and girls are addressed in interventions and resulting outcomes and impacts.
At this juncture, there are no excuses for donor agendas that do not account for the evidence from the field; agendas that do not respond to the root causes of the expansion of this epidemic, specially amongst women and girls; and agendas that ignore the need for comprehensive sustainable programs that address varied threats to women’s lives and rights.
We already know what is needed, and in most cases what works. Our analysis, our experience and now commitment to consistent programming accompanied by monitoring so that we can continue to learn and shift is needed now more than ever.
Curbing the growth of the HIV epidemic will require a concerted, resourced and systematic effort, including by donors, to eliminate all forms of violence against women. Time has already passed for international agencies and regional bodies, such as UNAIDS, PEPFAR, the European Commission, the African Union, to tackle these issues as a matter of urgency.
The Women WON'T wait. End HIV and HIV and Violence Against Women Women. NOW. campaign is an international coalition of organisations and networks from the global South and North. We are committed to women's health and human rights in the struggle to address HIV and AIDS and end all forms of violence against women and girls. For more information go to: www.womenwontwait.org |
