The Alliance participates in the Eighth International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific
24 September 2007
Over 40 members of the Alliance family attended this year’s International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP), held in August in Colombo, Sri Lanka. These included staff from country offices and linking organisations as well as the Alliance’s Asia regional representative and members of the Alliance secretariat.
With over 2000 delegates, this year’s conference had a higher percentage of sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgenders and injecting drug users than ever before. A diverse range of satellites and symposia, nearly 300 oral presentations and 700 posters generated productive discussions related to the conference’s main theme: scaling up policy and programmes. The conference’s main message was that leadership and activism, based on science, are essential for driving the scale-up of effective HIV programmes and influencing policy.
Alliance members were represented in the conference through seven posters, over 20 oral presentations, skills-building sessions, symposia and satellite events. The Alliance booth provided a meeting space for all Alliance members and was well visited by conference participants in general. It provided an important space for conference participants to learn more about the Alliance through discussions with representatives of country offices and linking organisations, who used the booth to showcase their work and publications.
A pre-conference Alliance family meeting Alliance participants to meet each other prior to the official launch of the conference. It also enabled Alliance participants to share information and develop the key messages that the Alliance wanted to promote during the conference.
A number of key messages particularly relevant to Alliance work emerged from the conference, especially those that touched on:
- self-organisation and leadership at the community level
- community participation as key to scale-up
- the need for protection against stigma, discrimination and marginalisation, and appropriate legal reform, especially for key populations
- the need for better data and more nuanced analysis in the design of key population programmes
- the importance of understanding gender and sexuality as fluid concepts in effective programming.
The conference also saw the launch of Minimum Standards for Civil Society Participation in the Universal Access Initiative, a toolkit produced by the Coalition of Asia Pacific Regional Networks on HIV/AIDS (also known as the Seven Sisters). It aims to help civil society groups and governments to improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of programmes and projects.
The Alliance blog and rapporteurs’ summaries provide additional information about Alliance participation and the Eighth ICAAP in general.
Alliance India showcases its work at ICAAP
