Interview with Jan Beagle, Deputy Executive Director for Management and External Relations at UNAIDS
Jan Beagle has been the Deputy Executive Director for Management and External Relations at UNAIDS since 2009 and holds more than 30 years experience in the political, development, management and interagency areas of the United Nations. Ms. Beagle is a former Deputy Director of the United Nations Office in Geneva, and has previously held senior positions in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General and the United Nations Development Programme. Prior to joining the United Nations, she served in her country’s diplomatic service, including five years as a New Zealand delegate to the United Nations. Ms. Beagle has a Master’s degree with first class honours from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She joined the International Women’s Summit to participate in discussions on HIV and AIDS around the world and delivered a plenary address entitled, “Getting to Zero: Responding to the HIV Specific Needs of Women and Girls.”
The World YWCA had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Beagle at the International Women’s Summit on July 12, 2011.
What is your impression of the International Women’s Summit so far?
I think it’s fascinating. A wonderful opportunity to meet people - there is such a wide range of people here from the most senior people to very young women. I think it’s great. This is my first time at an IWS conference, and the topic [“Women Creating a Safe World”] really resonates with the work of UNAIDS, because a lot of our work is in relation to women and girls—stigma, discrimination, and the underlying factors that really fuel the AIDS epidemic.
At the IWS you delivered a speech entitled, “Getting to Zero: Responding to the HIV Specific Needs of Women and Girls,” can you tell us what you talked about?
The vision of UNAIDS is zero AIDS-related deaths, zero new infections, and zero discrimination. The whole focus is on treatment for those who need it - and we’ve got many millions waiting for treatment - but particularly on prevention. Stigma and discrimination is a huge part of prevention. Dealing with stigma is an issue that is particularly impacting women. This conference is really important for us because it brings together women and girls of all ages, from all countries, to discuss the issue of safe space. I think safe space is very constant in terms of what it all comes down to, and in our panel, we talked about that. It is basically women having the choice in terms of the kind of life they want to lead. Particularly with HIV, the factors that fuel inequality everywhere, particularly gender inequality, are major factors underlying the epidemic—lack of education, lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services and rights, gender-based violence, poverty, and inequalities of all kinds are fueling the epidemic. And it is one that is growing among young women in particular. The conference is a very good platform to talk about the issue and how it links so much to the movement towards gender equality.
What is the progress that women and girls have made in respect to prevention of HIV?
In terms of the HIV epidemic, we haven’t made anywhere near enough progress. We’ve made some significant progress in the area of treatment—we’ve now got about 6 million people receiving treatment around the world, but we still have about 9 million people waiting for treatment. That means that there aren’t the resources there that would give them access to the drugs that could save them. We’ve eliminated mother-to-child transmission in high-income countries, but around 400,000 babies are born with HIV every year, largely in Sub-Saharan Africa. We have to eliminate that. HIV remains the leading cause of death among women of reproductive age worldwide, which is shocking in 2011.
The rate of new infections is growing rapidly among young women in many parts of the world, and not only amongst young women. In certain parts of the world, it is growing among women in what for them is a monogamous relationship. In other words, they are being infected by their own partner. As they are in established partnerships, they are considered low-risk in many societies and programmes are not directed towards them - and yet they are being infected. So, yes, we’ve made some progress, but I think we need to really scale-up the efforts to address the specific vulnerabilities for women and girls. In less than 50% of the countries there are particular provisions in the national policies for women and girls in relation to the AIDS response, and that is just not good enough.
At IWS we talked about what we need to do about the mutual responsibility and accountability between national governments, donor countries, civil society, and the private sector. It is so important for countries to know their epidemic in terms of gender and which groups are particularly vulnerable? It might be sex workers in one country, drug users in another country, or mainly heterosexual transmission. We need to have programmes that particularly target the groups at risk. We do have a lot of data, and to me the issue is to move beyond the evidence and towards action. At the political level, we now have a lot of commitment, but we don’t necessarily have the movement to action. We just had the High-Level Meeting in New York with some very important political commitment, but we did not get specific targets for women. We need to work towards these specific targets. Over 50% of those living with HIV are women and they are part of the vulnerable population.
Can you talk about the gap between governments having legal provisions and actually doing work on the ground?
Michelle Bachelet spoke about legal systems that ensure, or are supposed to ensure, legal protection in relation to the subject that we are dealing with, and there are a lot of countries that criminalise certain types of activity. These countries can decide their own laws, so it is none of our business, however if laws or legislative frameworks forbid people from having access to necessary services or discriminate against people so that they are not able to get treatment or care, then it is not in the national interest and it needs to be looked at.
How important is the World YWCA in addressing HIV and AIDS?
There are two aspects. One is the amazing reach of the organisation and the fact that the YWCA is able to embrace women of all ages. For me, one of the most exciting parts of this conference is that the first YWCA young women’s leadership strategy was developed for my own region, the Pacific region. It was just wonderful to see the energy of these young women supported by the YWCA in a region which often does not get a lot of attention. Harnessing the energy of young women is absolutely essential for the future. The YWCA is doing a great job of building young leaders.
The other part is the need for comprehensive, holistic responses. This goes for all development issues, but particularly for issues like HIV. HIV needs to be looked at from many different fronts, thus UNAIDS brings together a number of UN agencies to look at the problem from different aspects in a comprehensive way. It is very important that we are able to build a coalition among movements, including the women’s movement and the AIDS movement. How can we bring them together and really harness that passion and commitment of the different movements? I was thrilled to see how HIV was so integrated into the programme of this summit, it has been extremely encouraging.
What do you think the next steps should be in regards to combating the HIV epidemic and furthering the rights of women and girls?
I particularly like the title of creating a safe space for women. I think the conference has done that, but one issue that I talked about with regards to what is needed for the change is that we have not been good enough at really engaging men and boys, particularly boys and young men of a critical age group. One of the factors that is fuelling HIV is gender-based violence. We need to engage men and boys in a bigger way. Women are making a lot of progress in terms of access to education, and we now see reverse trends in some countries. I think we really need to think together about how we can do better there.
