During the campaign to bring affordable HIV treatment to people all over the world, South Africa’s Treatment Access Campaign volunteers spontaneously adapted the songs that united people during the fall of apartheid to the struggle that was keeping people in Africa from accessing HIV treatment. On July 10, in the halls of Mexico City’s Centro Banamex, the PHR Health Action AIDS team was part of yet another spontaneous rewriting of these songs. This time, instead of singing “We want AZT, we want Nevarapine,” we were singing about the global need for health workers.
We were part of a rally to raise awareness about the global health worker shortage that is curbing attempts to treat and prevent HIV across Sub-Saharan Africa. Organized by the Treatment Action Campaign, Medecins sans Frontieres, Health GAP, and PHR, this rally drew hundreds of supporters from the conference who marched through the Exhibition Hall, the conference center, and the Media Center singing, chanting, and speaking to the pain and suffering of people living with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to health workers. Holding signs stating “Where is my nurse?” and “Stop poaching our health care workers,” the rally brought together health workers from around the world with the organizations who support them to send a message to global development partners that the time to for action to solve the health workforce crisis is long overdue.
As Eric explains, AIDS activists and global health experts at the International AIDS Conference were unified in their recognition of the need to strengthen health systems and address the health workforce shortage. But, the resources are not yet flowing to address the gap between the health workforce needed to meet critical health goals such as Universal Access to HIV treatment or the Millenium Development Goals and the existing health workforce. We have had some successes—including the inclusion of training 140,000 new health workers as part of the United States Global Leadership against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008—but the funding available still falls well short of being adequate to address the global shortages.
And so, in partnership with health workers across the globe, we will continue to sing, to speak out, and to rally until the funding and the support follows.
The bus ride was long and hot, but it was worth it. Thousands of conference participants, with drums and signs and shirts and shouts, piled into a fleet of buses and headed to downtown Mexico City for the International Women’s March.
Amanda, Pete, Emily and Lissy and I wound our way through the narrow street lined with old churches, new McDonalds, tiled hotels, and lots and lots of curious onlookers sticking their heads out of windows and taking photos from balconies. We bought $1 hats to beat the heat. We regretted wearing heels. We waved signs, and yelled “All Women, All Rights” in three languages (not well, but loud).
It was fun, fierce and fabulous, and a great day to be a woman (or, well, Pete—and the hundreds of men and transgendered people who marched—after all women’s rights ARE human rights).
Granted, a march won’t change policy overnight—but since my first IAS conference in 2004, I’ve seen radical changes in the debate on women’s rights and HIV/AIDS. In Bangkok in 2004, it was all about ABC—a few groups were standing up and saying ABC was not a comprehensive rights based approach, that it focused too much on individual behavior and not the deep structural challenges women face—challenges rooted in culture, socio-economics, law and policy which put road blocks in from of women’s autonomy and freedom—but ABC was the norm. In Toronto, ABC was on the hot seat. During that conference, the tide really shifted away from a three prong behavior change approach to a broad prevention strategy which could encompass an alphabet.
Here at Mexico City, the focus in on changing the paradigm for women so they can realize their rights and fight AIDS—from housing to work to female controlled prevention methods to peer education—a rainbow of prevention options.
There is still so much to do—but marching a few miles in heels can actually make one quite optimistic (when followed by the world’s best tamales). PEPFAR has eliminated the harmful abstinence earmark—but has yet to promise needed integration of family planning and HIV services—but so many people here are committed to making this happen. Women’s rights and health systems have to be better integrated, or we will not win this fight.
Every woman on Earth needs education, employment, empowerment, and health systems that work, and they are demanding it now—and PHR is walking with them—from Serbia to St. Kitts, Malaysia to Mexico, united in the belief that we can change the world, one woman, one story, one very cheap sombrero at a time.
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Photo: PHR Staff at Women’s Rights March at International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. From Left: Emily Bancroft, Lissy DeSantis, Sarah Kalloch, Pete Witzler. (Amanda Cary/PHR).
As Health Action AIDS prepares to head to the XVII AIDS conference in Mexico, I’m struck by the slogan that permeates this site—AIDS: It’s Not Over. After 17 conferences and 3 decades, where is the global AIDS movement—and what can we expect when tens of thousand of people converge on Mexico City?
In so many ways, we are looking at a revolution. In Durbin, at the 13th AIDS conference in 2000, activists from across the globe demanded AIDS treatment be made widely available in the developing world. However, many policy makers and drug companies insisted treatment was too expensive for Africa—a disgusting display of arrogance and disregard for human life that was only changed by the unfailing efforts of PLWAs and AIDS activists.
Four years later, in Bangkok, the world had committed to the World Health Organization’s 3×5 and to PEPFAR, but no one had thought about the number of doctors, nurses lab tech, pharmacists, community health workers and others who would be needed to treat these millions—until PHR put the health workforce issue on the map and changed the dynamic of that conversation.
Now, in 2008, the US senate just passed a $48 billion AIDS, TB and Malaria Bill, popularly known as PEPFAR 2—thanks to the amazing advocacy of people like you. Calls, emails, visit to policy makers revolutionized what we can expect from the US government in term of support—and has given hope to millions.
Despite these successes, there is still so much left to be done. In the past 8 years we’ve seen clearly that AIDS puts into harsh spotlight other deep barriers to the realization of human rights worldwide—barriers which must be overcome to fight AIDS and make health rights a reality.
- AIDS has illuminated profound health systems challenges in poor countries: through integrated programming, AIDS funding can drive solutions to malaria, TB, diarrhea, family planning and more—and can help guarantee the right to health for millions of the world’s most poor people—if done right.
- AIDS has also cast a harsh spotlight on the denial of women’s fundamental human rights in so many societies—we can’t stop AIDS, or maternal mortality, or child deaths, or poverty, or ANYTHING, without women’s true and total empowerment—a major theme at Mexico which the HAA team will explore and report back to you about on this blog.
AIDS certainly is not over—but we are all making a difference in changing the course of this epidemic. Please join us in our journey to Mexico, and in the journey to stop AIDS and build systems based on human rights and dignity. The future of tens of millions depends on it.
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