HIV continues to take a heavy toll on women and girls. Every week, 4,000 young women and girls around the world are newly infected with HIV – 3,100 of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Violence against women and girls, which increases the risk of HIV for women by 50 per cent, remains pervasive, with no country within reach of eradicating it. Restrictions on young women’s bodily and economic autonomy further exacerbates their risk of infection.
The solutions are clear. To end the HIV epidemic, we must prioritize the rights, health, and agency of women and girls in all their diversity. Women and girls need access to HIV prevention methods that they can afford and control. The new twice-yearly injection with 100 per cent efficacy holds transformative potential. But prevention must be paired with accessible care, psychosocial support, and laws rooted in gender equality and human rights.
To enable this, we must ensure that women’s organizations, particularly those of women living with HIV, are adequately funded, so that they can continue to be key players in the HIV response. We must invest in strengthening women’s leadership. We must build on community-led responses that are key to removing structural barriers for women and girls. We know that this, especially for young women, along with providing mentorship helps them to become powerful change-makers in the HIV response. And we must transform unequal gender norms that put women and girls at risk of HIV and that create barriers to health services.
In 1995, world leaders united to adopt the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. One of the commitments in this visionary agenda for women’s rights was ending HIV and AIDS for women and girls. On World AIDS Day, and every day, let us recommit to these promises by ensuring women’s rights and gender equality are central to the HIV response. Women and girls deserve no less.
