Alliance highlights marginalisation and community mobilisation in Women Deliver conference
04 December 2007
In mid-October 2007, the UK was host to the Women Deliver conference, intended to spotlight the critical connections between women’s health, rights, education and poverty reduction, and to raise political and financial commitments to address women’s health and rights. Several Alliance members attended, including representatives from Latin America, Madagascar, India, Mongolia, the Caribbean, and the secretariat. They heard speakers outline new proposals for investment to make pregnancy safer and enable women around the world to reach their fullest potential.
The conference included a grant announcement by the UK government of more than US$200 million to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), to advance women’s reproductive health worldwide; a US$11 million investment by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to distribute new technology against post-partum blood loss in Nigeria and India; and a commitment from Japan to put global health at the centre of the Group of Eight summit meeting in Japan next year. Pledges of further action also came from the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Labour Organisation, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, Exxon/Mobil, and GlaxoSmithKline.
Alliance panel sessions
The conference was organised and sponsored through a partnership of UN agencies, international NGOs, and bilateral organisations. The Alliance – in collaboration with UNFPA, Interact Worldwide, Action for Global Health and OSI – participated by organising two panels. In this way, the Alliance was able to make an important contribution to the conference – important in light of the fact that issues of marginalisation and the importance of community mobilisation were otherwise addressed to only a very limited extent.
The first panel entitled Promoting SRH, HIV and AIDS integration and health systems strengthening in the work of the Global Fund – moderated by Fiona Pettitt of the International Community of Women living with HIV (ICW) – highlighted the Global Fund as an important funding mechanism to address HIV, as well as broader health issues affecting women.
Dr Altantsetseg Batsukh from Alliance linking organisation the Mongolian National AIDS Foundation discussed the processes leading to the development of Mongolia’s Round Seven proposal, which includes a strong focus on sexual and reproductive health and HIV integration. She described the integrated interventions included in the proposal, and outlined the process of negotiation with the country coordinating mechanism and other stakeholders to bring integration onto the agenda. The Mongolian example strongly highlighted the need for support by multi- and bi-laterals to facilitate functioning of the country coordinating mechanisms, and the need for adequate engagement of civil society within them.
Felicity Daly of Interact Worldwide presented on trends in policy debates regarding the role of the Global Fund, discussing upcoming opportunities and outstanding policy decisions. She outlined a current advocacy initiative – of which the Alliance is a leader (alongside Interact Worldwide, the Global AIDS Alliance, IPPF and PAI) – which is intended to increase support and funding from the Fund for programmes linking sexual and reproductive health and HIV. The session provided an important opportunity to highlight the flexibility of the Global Fund, and the importance of civil society engagement in its structures and processes.
Women and leadership
The second panel organised by the Alliance, in collaboration with OSI and UNFPA, and moderated by UNFPA’s deputy executive director Dr Purnima Mane, was a session entitled Women and Leadership: Harm reduction and empowerment to address HIV/AIDS. This aimed to showcase the impact of empowering women living with and affected by HIV in situations of high vulnerability in Eastern Europe, Latin America and India. Each of the speakers’ personal stories was testimony to human rights abuses faced by women in various settings, as well as to the changes their engagement with HIV issues brought about in their own lives and those of others. The session highlighted issues of marginalisation and human rights violations faced by women infected and affected by HIV.
