Kenya: Empowering Women Key Step in Fight Against AIDS. 07/07/07

OPINION
7 July 2007
Elizabeth Mataka and Zeda Rosenberg
 More than 1,000 leaders from around the world came together in Nairobi this week to discuss issues related to HIV and Aids. While conferences on the pandemic are rather commonplace, this meeting was different.

This time, African women - doctors, activists, nurses, grandmothers, community leaders, and women living with HIV - took centre stage at the International Women's Health Summit.

It makes good sense that women are leading the fight against Aids. Some 60 per cent of Africans living with HIV are women. Among young people the situation is worse: More than 75 per cent of 15-24-year-olds living with HIV in Africa are women.

In Kenya, young women are five times as likely as young men to be HIV positive.

In Zambia, aids has reduced a woman's average life expectancy to 37 years. Across the continent, women are struggling to educate orphans, care for the sick, and feed their families under the weight of this epidemic.

Encouraging people to always use condoms and be faithful to one partner is important, but it is not enough. In fact, we know that in some cases marriage, or what a woman believes is a monogamous relationship, can actually increase a woman's risk of HIV.

A woman may not be able to convince her partner to use condoms - or she and her partner may want to have children, which they cannot do while abstaining or using condoms. And remaining faithful to her husband cannot protect a woman whose husband is not faithful to her.

To successfully defeat Aids we must do more to help women to protect themselves.

A vaccine to prevent HIV, once developed, could save millions of lives. Another promising tool is a microbicide, a vaginal gel, ring or tablet that women could use to prevent infection.

Advocates in Africa

Microbicides are not yet available, but researchers and advocates in Africa and around the world are working to develop them and carry out clinical trials to test if they are safe and effective in preventing HIV infection.

By putting protection from HIV into the hands of women, a microbicide would slow the spread of the virus and finally allow women to take control over their own health.

We must prioritise research on these promising preventive technologies. At the same time, we must do more with the tools that already exist.

The female condom should be affordable and accessible to women in Africa.

We must expand prevention of mother-to-child-transmission services so that every pregnant woman receives the care and treatment she needs.

Like nearly all of us, the women attending this week's summit have lost family members, workmates, and friends to this disease.

These women are on the frontlines every day - the doctor working long hours in the clinic, the grandmother who cares for her orphaned grandchildren, the community care worker visiting the homes of the sick, the woman living with HIV who had the courage to say so publicly, the sex worker who spends her days educating her peers at the taxi rank.

These women are the ones who have told us of the desperate need for female-initiated HIV prevention approaches. After all, their lives and the future of our families and countries depend on it.

Elizabeth Mataka is the United Nations Secretary General's Special Envoy for Aids in Africa. Dr Zeda Rosenberg is Chief Executive Officer of the International Partnership for Microbicide.