Women Arise Takes Off at CSW
On Thursday March 4, 2010 at the CSW, Women Arise was officially launched, an initiative to ensure that “all women and women’s issues are central and visible in the objectives and programme” of the next AIDS Conference in Vienna in July 2010 and future conferences. With AIDS now the leading cause of death among women of childbearing age worldwide, the need to incorporate gender dimensions into research, education, and advocacy on HIV and AIDS is more urgent than ever.
The World YWCA has been an integral partner in Women ARISE, a coalition of international women’s groups and organisations from around the world, working together to galvanise and promote a common agenda on women and girls’ rights in the AIDS response. ARISE is an acronym for: Access, Rights, Investment, Security, and Equity.
Key messages identified by Women Arise cover women’s human rights; violence against women, the links between sexual and reproductive health and HIV, the relationship between HIV and AIDS and community development, as well as leadership and accountability.
World YWCA General Secretary Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda spoke on the high level panel to announce Women Arise. She underlined the intersectionality of HIV, gender, and violence, and reminded the audience that the recommendations of the 1995 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) had also not been fully implemented. She said an ICPD +15 was needed, similar to the Beijing +15 review. Nyaradzayi spoke of the rights of positive women to be part of policy making, citing their slogan, “Nothing about us, without us.”
She said that experiences of individual women in communities provided another source of data that researchers should take into account: “Their stories are evidence too…it is not only about numbers but about individuals.” She gave an example of young women who were born HIV positive and who had questions about hormonal interaction with their antiretroviral treatment when menstruation started and called for scientists to follow up on concerns raised by these individual girls and women. She noted there would be a young women’s forum for the first time at the 2010 International AIDS Conference.
“The YWCA has been advocating for the rights of women for 155 years and we’ll do it for another 155,” said the General Secretary. We’re are not going to sit down unless women enjoy equality and full human rights and dignity.”
Another panelist, Purnima Mane, Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund explained , “Gender issues have been cited as drivers of the epidemic, but the rhetoric stopped there. Concrete action plans with budgets attached are needed. Governments asked what they should do and now we’ve told them [through Women Arise] and they have no excuses.”
Robin Gorna, Executive Director, International AIDS Society (IAS), the organisation which organizes the biannual international AIDS conferences noted that these meetings give the “community a chance to take stock of where it is.” She decried the fact that funds for HIV and AIDS “are flatlining, just at the point when we know what we need to do.” They are actively trying to encourage presentations at the conference that have a gender dimension, and noted that 43 percent of the abstract reviewers are women, and 62 percent of workshop reviewers are women. Women will chair both the 2010 Conference and the 2012 Conference in Washington, DC.
Sheila Tlou, Co-chair of Global Task Force on Women and Former Minister of Health in Botswana said she was “happy to say that the next World AIDS Conference will have Parliamentarians there to talk about what they’ve done for women, girls and gender equality.”
Panelists also reiterated the call for sex and age disaggregated data.
More information about the initiative as well as the full document are available at: www.aidswomencaucus.org/womenarise
