Shukria's last day

The day was really productive with discussions concerning food security, nutrition and HIV & AIDS. All the participants agreed that ensuring food security at family and community levels were important. Women and girls particularly, who are mostly infected and affected by HIV are more stigmatized by HIV and are not considered significant individuals especially in developing countries where no preference is given to their essential nutrition needs.

Less funding is available to meet the nutritional requirements of People living with HIV and their families throughout the world. Global Fund provides this support to the governments of different countries.

An inspiring case study of an HIV+ person from Africa was also discussed whose CD 4 count was only 1. Proper and good nutrition in addition to ARVs helped her to survive. Her mother also played a very critical role in motivating her and providing her with the timely nutritional intake.

It is always pleasant to see donor commitments at big forums, however when it comes to implementation countries are met with many challenges due to the lack of funds and political leaders not fulfilling those commitments for the HIV+ community. It was pointed out that favoritism and personal relationships are preferred in comparison to selection on merit especially in developing countries with regards to resource distribution. These are the issues which really need to be addressed appropriately.

Discussions were carried out on strengthening the agricultural sector since it is very important to market the sector as sustainable and can be strengthened to contribute to timely and proper nutritional items for people living with HIV and their families.

There is a lot of stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV therefore joint efforts from civil society organizations, governments and communities are required to rise above this. UNAIDS and Governments primary focus should be on policies for HIV+ people and a strategy for the implementation of the commitments for Universal Access to Treatment, Prevention, Care and Support. Furthermore, there is a great need for evidence based research on the impact of nutrition for people living with HIV in order to meet their appropriate nutritional needs and to ensure that food and nutrition elements are fully integrated into HIV programming and to ensure quality services delivery.

UNAIDS Evaluation and Gender on the Agenda

Today the discussion started with the Second Independent Evaluation of UNAIDS, as we ran out of time in the meeting yesterday. Although there is a new Division of Labour (DOL) amongst the UN agencies in relation to who will be the lead agent or convener on the implementation of the UNAIDS priority areas, it is still unclear how this new DOL will work better. It was stressed in the discussions on the floor that all stakeholders must be involved in the implementation, decision making and monitoring of the activities. I appreciate the ambitious UNAIDS strategy, one of the recommendations implemented from the Second Independent Evaluation, though I am interested to see how this will affect us on the ground. The mention of key populations and human rights in the UNAIDS Strategy will really affect my work as my organisation works directly with these population groups in care, support, advocacy and prevention.

I was interested to hear about the work UNAIDS will be doing to assess needs and build the capacity of their staff including training of the UCC’S and the RSTs on areas of human rights and gender equality. The UNAIDS made a commitment to move towards a single administrative of the secretariat and encourages on- going effort of the secretariat to use the administrative cost by seeking the most effective cost provision of the service. With the leadership of a core working group, which consists of civil society, UNAIDS, government, People living with HIV an assessment for capacity building will be done in a number of countries.

The next agenda item was a discussion on Gender Sensitivity of the AIDS response and interventions from the floor requested a stronger linkage between women and girls sexual and reproductive health and HIV. Interventions from the NGO delegation stressed the importance for doing research on the female condoms. NGO’s requested UNAIDS to ensure indicator and budgetary allocating in relation to outcome areas of the meeting. The needs of women and girls on the country level need to be met especially those needs that are in line with the UNAIDS Agenda for Accelerated Country Action for Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV (the Agenda). Meaningful partnerships such as UNAIDS, national stakeholders and civil society was also highlighted. In terms of reporting, best practice models on the collaboration between UNAIDS and civil society to be documented in order to better understand and address HIV specific needs of women and girls, including the promotion and protection of their rights. As part of the NGO interventions, a progress report on the achievement of the implementation of the Agenda was requested to be presented at the 28th PCB meeting. This comprehensive report is to highlight specific outcomes for each country, which should demonstrate action and inform the work of the UNAIDS joint programme at country level. There was also an ask for a budget with core and supplemental costs dedicated to empowerment of woman and girls in the context of HIV.

Day One of the PCB

Today, 6th December the actual PCB kicked off at the CICG, the Centre for International conferences of Geneva. Michel Sidibe opened the session with his Executive report and spoke about universal access, treatment care and support and prevention revolution.
The Twenty sixth PCB meeting minutes were shared and highlighted a strong link to the current strategy on sexual and reproductive health and HIV. In addition the meeting taught me three components, universal access, care and support and human right .There was also an extensive discussion on the UNAIDS strategy regarding care and support and universal access of treatment for people living with HIV , especially for woman and girls and vulnerable groups. Dr Françoise, who discovered the HIV virus presented a good session on treatment. The discussion was very useful as she talked about treatment for when the cd4 count is very high. She also indicated the importance of adherence and the effects it has on the body. Furthermore, there is research under way to look the African monkey who has a similar virus (SIV) to discover why they don’t get sick, and what that means to people living with HIV as well as treatment options. Furthermore UNAIDS shared their strategy for the next five years and stressed the importance of country commitment to roll this out. The UNAIDS vision of zero new infections, zero AIDS related deaths, zero discrimination was reiterated. The importance of comprehensive prevention work was also discussed as the Prevention revolution presents considerable cost cutting for HIV treatment, because less people will then be infected. All the countries shared their commitment to the UNAIDS strategy and agreed to develop an operational plan as a means of implementation. After the meeting we had a debriefing with the NGO delegation as well as the WAC observers team.

Introducing Shukria

My name is Shukria Gull and I was invited by the World AIDS Campaign to attend the 27th UNAIDS program coordinating board as an observer. I am from Pakistan and work for PakPlus Society, which focuses on care and support for PLHIV as well as prevention and advocacy. I have been working with positive women for the last 15 years working on stigma and discrimination at family level, service delivery agencies, specifically in the health care sector as well as community level. I started my journey on Thursday 2nd of December and reached Geneva on Friday 2.30pm. On Sunday I attended a pre- meeting convened by the PCB NGO delegation. This meeting was held at the WHO offices. The meeting was in preparation for the PCB and looked at Agenda touching on issues around criminalization of key populations, to engage with the women and girl’s agenda around Sexual and Reproductive health as well as the NGO intervention on decision points.