European Commission and UNIFEM Partner to Support Gender Equality in the Context of HIV and AIDS
The European Commission and UNIFEM are embarking on a programme that will be implemented in Rwanda, Kenya, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea and Cambodia. With a total budget of €2,450,353 for three years, the programme will focus on promoting the leadership of HIV-positive women’s groups and gender equality advocates, to ensure that gender equality priorities are identified, realized and budgeted in national HIV and AIDS responses. An inception and planning meeting took place in Nairobi, Kenya, in April 2009 with key stakeholders and UNIFEM staff, where implementation strategies and indicators to measure programme results were defined.
Today more than 30 million people are living with HIV, half of them women. While combating HIV and AIDS has remained high on the international community’s agenda for more than 25 years, the efforts to address the gender dimensions of the epidemic are still inadequate. Women and girls still do not have equal access to services or resources and have little or no participation in decision-making when it comes to national responses to HIV and AIDS. Lessons learned from previous UNIFEM programmes indicate that AIDS policies and programmes do not work for women until gender equality experts and women’s organizations — particularly those of HIV-positive women — help shape their content and direction.
Drawing on UNIFEM’s expertise in supporting gender equality and human rights in programming on HIV and AIDS, the programme will particularly focus on ensuring technical assistance to national governments for designing, implementing and evaluating gender-responsive national AIDS strategies, and promoting HIV-positive women’s leadership and participation in policy-making and informing priority-setting within HIV and AIDS responses.
In addition to the Beijing Platform for Action, Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), key global commitments on HIV and AIDS and gender equality include the 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS adopted at the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS). The Declaration was reaffirmed by States in 2006 with the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS that also further recognized the role gender inequalities and all forms of violence against women play in increasing women’s vulnerability to HIV and AIDS. The programme will also contribute to enhance the implementation of important EU commitments, as stipulated in the European Consensus on Development and the EU Agenda for Action on the Millennium Development Goals.
The programme will target policy makers at national level, particularly AIDS coordinating bodies and women’s machineries, as well as HIV-positive women’s networks and gender advocates. The focus will be on building institutional and individual capacities, identifying gender equality priorities, delivering on commitments to these priorities and developing political advocacy strategies and skills for HIV-positive women’s groups and networks.
Source:
UNIFEM
