HIV & AIDS

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) reported that women now make up half of the population living with HIV in the Caribbean, compared to just 30 percent of the total in 1999. But among the 15-24 age group, women represent 62 percent of those living with HIV.

Every two or three days a person is killed in Brazil in violence connected with his or her sexuality, according to Brazil's oldest gay rights association, Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB). In Mexico, the reported figure is nearly two a week.

When Mary Muli and her husband failed to conceive a child, they followed the long-held tradition among the Kemba in Kenya's Eastern Province and brought another woman into their home to bear children for them.

The latest UNAIDS Report estimated that 33 million people around the globe are living with HIV; 22 million in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. Around 2.7 million new HIV infections occurred worldwide in 2007. However, encouraging new data suggests there have been significant gains in preventing new infections in several African countries with high prevalence rates.

Strengthening Resistance focuses on the points of intersection in the social, political and public health crises of violence against women and HIV/AIDS. The report uses a human rights lens to focus on critical political challenges and on innovative strategies used by activists worldwide as they respond to the links between violence and HIV/AIDS. From street theater to telenovelas/soap operas to traditional lobbying, activists in both VAW and HIV/AIDS communities are beginning to work together to focus attention to ways both crises are causes and consequences of each other. Neither can be addressed adequately without taking into account the links between them and the human rights implications of each crisis on its own, and in conjunction with the other.

According to the latest (2008) WHO and UNAIDS global estimates, women comprise 50% of people living with HIV.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 60% of people living with HIV. In other regions, men having sex with men (MSM), injecting drug users (IDU), sex workers and their clients are among those most-at-risk for HIV, but the proportion of women living with HIV has been increasing in the last 10 years

 A workshop on gender violence and HIV/AIDS organised by Gender and Child's Right Initiative (GCRI), a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) dedicated to uplifting the status of women and young persons, has ended in Lagos.

The workshop took place at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, in conjunction with Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international NGO that manages Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project on African Women. The workshop, tagged Engaging Business and Corporate Organisations in Health and Social Issues held under the distinguished chairmanship of Professor Osita Eze, Director General, Nigeria Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos. The objective of the project was to advocate for change in public policy while sensitising corporate organisations on gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. It was also to build strong networks of business and corporate organisations to lend their voices to advocacy work in this area. The workshop attracted several corporate organisations which include MTN, NGOs, Government representatives and Journalists.