UNIFEM UK: Working for women's empowerment and gender equality

Progress for Women Is Progress for All

UNIFEM's four strategic goals:

3: Halting the Spread of HIV/AIDS

Half the HIV-positive people in the world are now women. In Africa, where the epidemic is most severe, young women are three times more likely to be infected than young men. Women globally know less than men about how to prevent infection, and what they do know often fails to protect them in the face of violence and discrimination. UNIFEM works from the premise that HIV/AIDS is a health and development issue, but also intimately linked to gender inequality.

UNIFEM Responds: Strategies That Make a Difference

UNIFEM brings gender equality and human rights perspectives to its work on women and HIV/AIDS. It spearheads holistic strategies that make clear links to violence against women, feminized poverty, security and women's limited voice in the decisions affecting their lives.

Supporting women's participation: UNIFEM helps build the capacity of women to take part in policy-making on HIV/AIDS. It supports women seeking to reframe laws and programmes to promote gender equality and reduce stigma.

Building partnerships: UNIFEM strikes alliances with national HIV/AIDS councils, women's groups, and local, national and international governmental bodies. It mobilises activities on gender and HIV/AIDS with partner UN organizations, including UNAIDS and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) ensuring that women remain high on the HIV/AIDS agenda of the UN system as a whole.

Linking HIV/AIDS and violence: Violence against women is a major factor fuelling the spread of HIV among women, whether it takes place domestically or during armed conflict. UNIFEM works with the World Health Organization and other partners to break vicious cycles of physical harm, ill health and disempowerment.

Advocating for gender: UNIFEM regularly produces cutting edge advocacy materials exploring the gender dimensions of HIV/AIDS, and chronicling the latest data and research.

At Work Around the World

Africa

In Nigeria, UNIFEM supported the development of a gender-responsive HIV/AIDS policy for healthcare facilities in Enugu State. The first of its kind in the country, the policy provides for intensive counselling, confronts discrimination against pregnant women, and ensures equal access for men and women to anti-retroviral drugs. UNIFEM backed advocacy in Somalia that brought gender into the national HIV/AIDS strategy, and a study in East Africa on HIV/AIDS care practices and policies. The study documented how women's disproportionate share of care-giving threatens their rights and livelihoods, and makes them vulnerable to infection.

Arab States

In five countries, UNIFEM is working with national organizations that specialize in reproductive health issues to introduce some of the region's first information resources on HIV/AIDS.

Asia and the Pacific

UNIFEM and the UN Development Programme collaborated with Indian Railways on a massive outreach campaign to its 1.8 million employees, offering gender-sensitive counselling through the Railway's extensive network of schools, hospitals and union groups. Partnerships with Indian women's groups, including the Positive Women's Network, have brought gender into national HIV/AIDS strategies, and extended outreach efforts to state and local governments as well as the National Commission for Women.

Central and Eastern Europe

In Kyrgyzstan, the first community-based research on HIV/AIDS among rural men and women took place with UNIFEM support. The findings included information on what makes women vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. Local training and communication strategies based on the research are now transforming stereotypes about the epidemic among local authorities, journalists, religious leaders, students and medical workers.

Latin America and the Caribbean

In Brazil and Honduras, UNIFEM assisted gender advocates in assessing HIV/AIDS legislation as a first step toward improving national policies. An organisation of Afro-Brazilian women has begun monitoring access to HIV/AIDS services in Porto Alegre. Two of Honduras' largest women's groups are tracking national progress on international commitments on HIV/AIDS, and highlighting the connections between HIV/AIDS and violence.

The Web portal www.genderandaids.org was launched by UNIFEM in partnership with UNAIDS. It features current research, multimedia materials and toolkits, and is designed for community activists, government officials, development practitioners and journalists.

UNIFEM collaborated with UNAIDS and the UN Population Fund to produce the report Women and HIV/AIDS: Confronting the Crisis. It emphasises that there will be no progress on HIV/AIDS without strategies that focus on women, and highlights the key components of an effective response, as identified by the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS. As a member of the coalition, UNIFEM contributes to an advocacy campaign on home- and community-based care for people living with HIV/AIDS.

How you can help:

The projects undertaken by UNIFEM make a difference to the everyday lives of women around and their families around the world. UNIFEM UK needs your support to help fund this work and to raise awareness of the issues affecting women's rights and security.

Find out more on our 'How YOU can help' page.
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UNIFEM UK – United Kingdom National Committee for UNIFEM

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