UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

Chapter 8Sigrun Mogedal, who is currently the Norwegian Government’s Ambassador for HIV/AIDS,commented: “I’ve started to say ‘look back at Beijing and Cairo’ 13 . If we had done what wesaid then, the local communities would be much more resilient to AIDS. We have a series ofmissed opportunities, we’ve somehow known what we needed to do with women’s vulnerability,with the link between reproductive health (at that time, not AIDS because we hadn’tcome to grips with it yet) … and how important it was for women to choose and to beempowered to protect their own sexuality and so on. So I feel that the history of AIDS issort of a parallel history, demonstrating the missed agenda, the missed opportunities in thedevelopment agenda [for women]”.215Stephen Lewis, former Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for HIV/AIDS in Africa since2001, has consistently pressed the international community to focus more on women. Heasked: “Where are the laws that descend with draconian force on those who are guilty ofrape and sexual violence? Where are the laws that deal with rape within marriage? Where arethe laws in every country that enshrine property and inheritance for women? Where are thelaws that guarantee equality before the law for women in all matters economic and social? Inshort, where are the laws, which move decisively towards gender equality? … Whole societiesare unravelling, as parts of Africa are depopulated of their women”.In early 2004, a major new initiative – the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS (GCWA)– was launched by a number of partners led by UNAIDS 14 . The aim was to draw attention tothe failure of countries, when planning and implementing AIDS prevention programmes, toaddress the factors that put women at risk for HIV. The coalition stressed the need to focuson women’s economic, biological and social vulnerability, to secure women’s rights, to investmore money in AIDS programmes that work for women and to ‘allocate more seats at thetable for women’ in, for example, the forums where AIDS strategies are discussed. It hasbrought together key actors from the UN, governments and civil society to promote greaterattention to the needs of women and to empower them to take control of their lives.The coalition adopted the slogan ‘To make women count, count women’, based on the factthat ‘we measure what we value’. UNAIDS and WHO published all the available evidenceand data on women and AIDS in the 2004 Epidemic Update, and WHO agreed to collectdata disaggregated by sex and age in the “3 by 5” initiative.At the 16 th Meeting of the UNAIDS PCB in December 2004, Piot warned that though the focuson women, gender and AIDS was extremely critical, it was not popular everywhere. Neitherdid such a focus mean that UNAIDS would neglect the issues surrounding men who have sexwith men, including the discrimination and violence faced by them. PCB members voiced13In 1995, the UN Fourth World Conference on Women took place in Beijing, China, and, in 1994, the InternationalConference on Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo, Egypt.14Convening agencies include the Global Campaign on Education, UNICEF, the International Center for Researchon Women, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations DevelopmentFund for Women, WHO, the International Women’s Health Coalition and UNFPA.