Description

Community participation in accountability is key to ending the AIDS epidemic

Extract

Advocacy by people living with and affected by HIV has been critical to the progress made the response to HIV since the beginning of the epidemic. Advocacy has sparked action in the face of denialism and indifference, mobilized unprecedented financial resources and enabled communities to participate in designing health services that meet their needs. When traditional policy-making processes stall due to bureaucracy, advocacy shines a light on the problem and leverages community power and political will to drive action and innovation.

This is why AIDS advocates around the world remain a major force for an accelerated, more equitable scale-up of effective HIV and health programming. Increased funding support for advocacy from private funders, multilateral organizations and governments is essential if the world is to meet ambitious FastTrack Targets around treatment, prevention and human rights, and advance towards ending the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030.
Community-led AIDS advocacy can include community mobilization, policy analysis, litigation, public events, media campaigns, accountability scorecards and protests, and it utilizes international and national human rights commitments to uphold the right to health.