News

Young women (15-24 years) in sub-Saharan Africa are eight times more likely to be living with HIV than their male counterparts. The time has come to think innovatively about how to reach young people and meet their needs.

If the battle to eradicate AIDS in this lifetime is to be won, there is a need for urgent transformation of the structural causes of inequality that render women vulnerable to infection and the advancement of women's rights.

For over two decades, women constitute the largest share of caregivers, community-level workers and volunteers who provide critical HIV prevention, treatment and support services both inside and outside their families.

Women with mental health issues were also found to be more than twice as likely to be living with HIV, compared to other women.

Girl Effect’s youth brand in Malawi has been recognised at the AIDS 2018 pre-conference by winning a Demand Creation Challenge award for best-in-class innovative, high-impact communication-based approaches to HIV prevention.

Adolescent girls living with HIV face significant barriers, including stigma and harmful gender norms, which often lead to isolation from their families and communities and a lack of the social support they need.

DREAMS Namibia is an initiative that empowers adolescent girls and young women to remain HIV-free and fully achieve their potential by addressing structural drivers that increase girls' HIV risk, including gender inequality.

Preventing HIV among girls and young women demands a more ambitious, holistic and flexible approach approach: one that includes attention to sexual and gender-based violence.

Gender inequalities and gender-based violence, combined with physiological factors, and restrictive laws around access to sexual and reproductive health services place women and girls in the region at high risk of HIV infection.

In KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa where girls are disproportionately affected by HIV, nurse Felicity Basson works with the DREAMS programme to provide girls with knowledge, support and information about their rights and services in order to prevent and manage HIV infections.

In Tanzania, a joint programme with the Ministry of Health, civil society organizations and the Global Fund is being piloted to combat HIV among adolescent girls and young women in the regions of Singida, Dodoma and Morogoro.

A study in Canada found that indigenous women living with HIV experience every day incidents of racism that impede their access to care disproportionately to other groups.

A study in the U.S. found that women living with HIV perceive many forms of stigma in addition to HIV-related stigma, such as stigma related to gender, race and poverty.

Women living with HIV in Ghana who serve as paralegals in their communities shared their concerns about the stigmatization women face due to HIV.

An event held during the European Union Development Days (EDD) discussed the importance of young women's participation in decision-making processes, education and access to health care to prevent new infections.

In this feature, Sylvia, a community health educator in South Africa, discusses experiences women affected by HIV face including: lack of knowledge about the virus and their rights and gender-based violence.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation Nigeria emphasized the need to create safe spaces allowing young women to express psycho-social issues they face around HIV, such as low confidence and inability to negotiate safer sex.

During an advocacy session with the state government, women living with HIV presented their needs for income generating activities and schooling for adolescents living with HIV.

A qualitative study among pregnant women in South Africa found many interviewees reported feeling they did not have a say in negotiating condom use and were unable to ask their partner of their HIV status.

Though HIV rates continue to decrease in Uganda, it is still significantly more prevalent among women than men. The reasons behind this disparity are complex, but largely boil down to different forms of gender inequality.