|
Grassroots Women Demand
Accountability to Communities on World AIDS Day
|
We, grassroots women
in the Huairou Commission AIDS Campaign, from 15 African countries, India,
Cambodia, Guatemala and Honduras have declared that it is time for the world
to recognize and resource grassroots women's on-going caregiving work and
leadership in the response to HIV and AIDS.
We, grassroots women working every day in our communities, have long been
coping with the changing face of HIV and AIDS, responding by meeting
essential needs and transforming development and governance processes,
increasing their accountability and ownership by those most affected.
We, home-based caregivers and grassroots women living with AIDS, who are
organized in self-help and support groups, have counted and valued our shared
contributions. These include (but are not limited to): direct provision of
home-based and palliative care, psychosocial and nutritional counseling;
ensuring treatment adherence; caring for orphans; empowering girls;
mobilizing resources, including developing innovative livelihoods strategies;
promoting food security strategies to maintain the physical well-being of
people living with AIDS; forging partnerships to secure and enforce women's
land and property rights; leading support groups for the infected and
affected; and running locally-appropriate and culturally sensitive
awareness-raising and stigma reduction campaigns.
Despite the growing recognition of our contributions to reducing the spread
of the pandemic and mitigating its impacts, the care, services and resources
home-based caregivers mobilize, are largely unaccounted for.
We, grassroots women are uniting communities, re-building social networks and
fabrics eroded by poverty and violence. We understand the linkages between
gender-based violence and HIV and AIDS. We stand in solidarity with our
sisters regions experiencing conflict and violence and recommend that the
voices and immediate needs of those who suffer are heard by governments, NGO
and women leaders.
We ask our partners and supporters to join us by making the following
commitments:
Our Commitment
We stand together in the shared values of grassroots women caring for their
families and communities, but against these roles and contributions being
detrimental to the health and well-being of these women, their families and
communities.
We commit ourselves to supporting grassroots women's organizations as we
struggle together for the empowerment of women and girls, and against
poverty, and as we gather to put an end to the devastation of the HIV and
AIDS pandemic.
Recognizing that good partnerships and power-sharing begin with us within
civil society and particularly the women's community, we commit to creating
and modeling demand-driven (vs. top-down) partnerships between grassroots
organizations, researchers, health service and advocacy organizations, development
institutions and donors.
We will advocate at all levels - local to global - to ensure that a minimum
percentage of global AIDS funding is targeted directly to support
community-led responses to HIV and AIDS, particularly those being led by
women, and that measurable standards and outcomes for those fundsare
instituted in affected communities.
We call upon the women's community to ensuring spaces for grassroots
home-based caregivers to speak for themselves in policy making venues and
will allocate a fair-share of the research, capacity-building and organizing
resources to grassroots women. Their unique and vital contributions in
responding to HIV and AIDS need to be recognized and rewarded now and not
tomorrow.
Therefore funds need to be allocated to support:
- Grassroots women's organizing as the most sustainable
solution to the cross-cutting causes and effects of HIV and AIDS
- Peer exchange as the most effective and empowering
way to transfer good practices
- Income-generating activities that can help to sustain
grassroots women's organizations and activities
- Community-led initiatives protecting women's land,
inheritance and property rights
We stand committed to working towards fostering real accountability in AIDS
funding processes through the establishment of democratic, transparent and
participatory processes for electing representatives to local and national
AIDS authorities.
|