The Alliance and Health and Development Networks are forming a partnership to strengthen information exchange related to local participation in national responses to HIV and tuberculosis.

Living with HIV and a mother of five, Chea explains how income generating activities supported by Alliance linking organisation KHANA and Battambang Women’s AIDS project have turned her family’s life around.

Alliance staff member Javier Hourcade Bellocq has started his term as board member of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, having served as an alternate board member for the communities’ delegation for the last 18 months.

The House of Lords recently hosted a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for street children. At the meeting, the Alliance outlined the impact of HIV and AIDS on street children, and the actions that UK Parliamentarians and the UK Government can take to help them.

In a letter endorsed by over 18 organisations, the Alliance and partners are calling for greater attention to HIV, particularly stigma and discrimination, within the new joint European Union-Africa Strategy. The strategy provides a framework for long-term relations between Africa and Europe.

In mid-October, the Alliance presented panel sessions at the Women Deliver conference, a gathering intended to spotlight the critical connection between women’s health, rights, education and poverty reduction, and to raise political and financial commitments to address women’s health and rights.

The Alliance has welcomed Jacqueline Rocha Côrtes, an HIV and human rights activist and consultant from Brazil, as a new member of its board of trustees.

In September, the Alliance and IPC in Burkina Faso organised a workshop for partners in francophone Africa to discuss the onward-granting aspects of their programmes. Find out more about the workshop.

Workshops organised by Alliance India have been helping programme partners and outreach workers to implement their programmes effectively. Two recent examples include supporting outreach workers to better select children for the provision of HIV services and helping partners and implementing organisations to strengthen advocacy work within their programmes.

Jeffrey O’Malley, who served as the International HIV/AIDS Alliance’s executive director from its establishment in 1993 until January 2004, has been appointed director of the United Nations Development Programme’s Global HIV/AIDS Group.

Jeff relocated to New York in November 2007 from New Delhi, where he had been country director for PATH, a US-based public health non-governmental organisation. As a co-sponsor of UNAIDS, UNDP focuses on HIV and human development issues, including mainstreaming HIV into poverty reduction strategies; intellectual property and access to treatment; governance of HIV responses, including civil society participation; and human rights and gender. UNDP is also a close partner of the Global Fund on AIDS, TB and Malaria, providing support to many Global Fund country partners, and serving as principal recipient in 24 countries for programmes totalling almost US$ 600 million.

Jeff is looking forward to new opportunities for collaboration with the Alliance and its partners in his new role. He can be reached at jeffrey.omalley@undp.org.