According to estimates from the UNAIDS/WHO Global Report (May 2006), around 36.3 million adults and 2.3 million children were living with HIV at the end of 2005.
African women are considerably more likely - at least 1.4 times - to be infected with HIV than men. source
From the amazing humanitarian, Stephen Lewis, Canada's former ambassador to the UN, now the UN Secertary General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa:
Swaziland continues to have the highest prevalence rate in the world at 42.6%. In its recent antenatal survey of pregnant women between the ages of 25 and 29, the prevalence rate was 56.3%.
Lesotho knows it is fighting for survival: words like extinction and annihilation are commonplace. The “Know Your Status” campaign is meant, unflinchingly, to confront the unthinkable.
...
What we’re fundamentally dealing with, then, is a legacy of inequality which drives the virus and leads to the devastation of the women and girls of the continent. The legacy is an omnibus catalogue of women’s vulnerability: rape and sexual violence, including marital rape; domestic violence; no sexual autonomy; early marriage of girls to older men; forced marriage; harmful traditional practices, including wife inheritance, widow cleansing, polygamy and female genital mutilation; maternal mortality rates as high as they’ve ever been; sugar Daddies; illiteracy; lack of educational access (the MDG on gender parity in primary schools has already been missed); designation as legal minors; lack of economic and earning power; lack of rights to own and inherit land or property; lack of representation in parliaments and other elected and appointed bodies … the litany never ends. source
It is my conviction that the staggering, disproportionate vulnerability of women to HIV/AIDS could have been diminished, dramatically, if the multilateral system had an agency to take up the cudgels on behalf of women. At some point in time, history will demand an explanation for the torpor that transfixed the international community while women were being decimated, and are still being decimated, in numbers that would numb the mind of Einstein.
How can we ever explain the fact that the funeral parlours and graveyards of Africa are filled with the bodies of young women in their late teens, twenties and thirties? I’ve just returned from Swaziland: in its most recent representative sample of ante-natal clinics, over fifty-six per cent of the women between the ages of 25 and 29 are infected. How is that other than Armageddon? How can we ever explain the fact that fewer than ten per cent of pregnant women in Africa have access to prevention of mother-to-child transmission in the year 2006? How can we ever explain the fact that fewer than ten per cent of the women in Africa know their HIV status in the year 2006? How can we ever explain the fact that grandmothers, aged, impoverished and failing, have become the last resort of orphan support in 2006? How can we ever explain the fact that young girls in a number of high-prevalence countries still don’t have knowledge of how the virus is transmitted? How can we ever explain the fact that laws against sexual violence and marital rape, and laws to embody property rights and inheritance rights, are still not a part of the legislative fabric of several countries at the epicentre of the pandemic in 2006? How can we ever explain the fact that so many international human rights instruments, from the African protocol for the rights of women to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, have been ratified by a host of African states, only to find them dishonoured in the breach? How can we ever explain the fact that the women of Africa carry the continent on their backs, and reel under the burden of care, unacknowledged and uncompensated, while the world looks on with eyes of glass? How can we ever explain the fact that the Millennium Development Goals, six of the eight of which explicitly address women, will never be reached in Africa by the year 2015? source
Grandmothers rally to raise AIDS orphans read more
Read about the Stephen Lewis Foundation
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If you haven't watched the clip above yet, do it now and then go see this, and this, and this.
Women - it's up to us. Reach out and help.
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