Dear friends – We are excited to share thoughts and reflections from the first half of 2019, and to look ahead to name where we hope to see you as we look through the year. First, thank you to everyone who has been and continues to be a part of building community with us. These are times of seismic change across the HIV movement and the broader health and development fields – and we believe vibrant, rights advancing, feminist, inclusive, and collaborative spaces are needed now more than ever. We seek to create and continue to grow spaces where we can learn from one another, challenge each other to do better, build new bridges, join up our agendas, and move forward together. This requires a leap of faith and a lot of good will. Thank you. Second, this is a time of change. Change can be good and change can be scary. Wherever each of us puts our time, energy, and expertise over the coming months – please let’s have each other’s back and recognize that there are strong forces working to undermine, reject, erase, and challenge the progress, ideals, values, and commitments we’ve each worked hard to secure for women and girls, our rights, our agency, our health, our safety, and our leadership inclusive of our diversity. Third, we have more to do. Gender equality, sexual and reproductive health, women’s empowerment, ending gender-based violence, and reproductive rights feature prominently in the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda. Eliminating gender inequalities and ending all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls are at the center of the 2016 Political Declaration on Ending AIDS and the Fast Track Commitments to End AIDS by 2030. As we drive towards these ambitious milestones across the global health and development landscape, it is imperative that we listen, learn, and partner meaningfully with young women who are powering change within their communities. We are at a pivotal moment with global recognition that women and young women are the key to ending the HIV epidemic for good – let’s now translate those commitments into reality. It’s extraordinary to consider that the ICPD+25 and Beijing +25 are upon us, and that they remain – in large part – the high-water mark. Yet – as ATHENA collaborators Lucy Wanjiku Njenga and Maximina Jokonya have asked in recent global fora including Women Deliver and the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board – how do young women today across Eastern and Southern Africa still only have access to the contraceptive methods that our mothers used? Or, as Lucy raised, how are we going to meet the ambitious goal of ending AIDS when young women leave school because they don’t have access to menstrual hygiene products? As always, we can only measure our accomplishments across the lived experiences of women and young women in all of their diversity. So where are some of the places we have been and what are some of the things we have been up to? ATHENA’s priorities for 2019 have included:
Strengthening our leadership as a network
We are continuing to grow as a team and as a Network, and to assess what our added value is as we build up new leadership across HIV and SRHR; advance shared advocacy agendas; and provide a critical voice for feminist women’s health advocacy in the particular context of adolescent girls, young women, and HIV. We have exciting new opportunities to put our values into practice through bi-directional assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of our Network. This has included attention to the “guts” of the work through internal planning as a core ATHENA team and building up our administrative and financial management systems; and the external work of creating spaces where diverse stakeholders could meet, be in dialogue, and identify shared areas for action at the Commission on the Status of Women with Frontline AIDS as well as at the June 2019 Programme Coordinating Board of UNAIDS.
Advancing accountability between global commitments, leadership, and tangible change in communities for adolescent girls and young women
This has included a delegation of young women leaders at the 2019 Commission on the Status of Women; a highlevel side event with young women leaders from around the world; participation in consultations around and hearings on Universal Health Coverage; and meetings with local stakeholders and national decision-makers organized by young women under the leadership of Winny Obure in Kenya. In addition, with support from Board member Nomi Fuchs-Montgomery, ATHENA convened an interactive and engaging roundtable discussion at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation facilitated by Ebony Johnson to bring the realities and community experiences of adolescent girls and young women into the walls of Gates Foundation where programme funding decisions are made. We heard young feminists call for a holistic approach towards information dissemination, research, and service delivery across HIV and family planning. Our call rang loud: one’s body cannot be separated in half to represent HIV and the other family planning, and that choice is essential.
Tracking #MeToo, and continuing to be a part of bringing change at UNAIDS and across the HIV response, particularly focused on safety and young women
We held a civil society dialogue with Gunilla Carlsson on the side of the Commission on the Status of Women facilitated by Nyasha Sithole; participated actively at the March Special Programme Coordinating Board meeting of UNAIDS focused on addressing sexual harassment and abuse of power; convened a lunch dialogue with UNAIDS staff, civil society stakeholders, and senior management to identify a way forward from the March Board meeting; and followed this agenda through to the June 2019 Programme Coordinating Board meeting of UNAIDS where member states made clear that funding for UNAIDS relied upon the re-assertion of integrity and action for the agency around ending sexual harassment and abuse of power. Read Nyasha’s blog about it here.
Accountability to feminist leadership and women’s rights throughout the work with men and boys to advance gender equality.
Lydia Mungherera has served on the Global Board of the MenEngage Alliance representing ATHENA, and has also brought our leadership to the regional work of MenEngage Africa. Building with the foundation that Lydia has established, ATHENA, the Equality Institute, and the MenEngage Alliance Secretariat have launched a new partnership to examine, discuss, and propose what accountability standards should look like in the era of attention to #MeToo and given the historic splintering of women’s rights work and gender transformative work with men and boys around political power, resourcing, and global influence to build bridges toward more collaboration, more dialogue, and when merited, more debate. ATHENA co-convened dialogues at the Commission on the Status of Women and Women Deliver to inform this agenda.
Influencing the HIV research agenda, and ensuring accountability to adolescent girls and young women
ATHENA was a community partner of the Women and HIV Workshop, represented by Teresia Otieno, a scientific research forum that takes place the weekend preceding CROI each year. Team members and collaborators Maximina, Nyasha, and Lucy presented on multiple panels and shared a poster from the Ready To Lead project in Zimbabwe. ATHENA also convened a lunch dialogue with Dr. Jared Baeten to discuss the broader HIV prevention research agenda, with a particular focus on the ECHO (Evidence for Contraceptive Options and HIV Outcomes) Trial. We learned that there is power in bringing together researchers and communities to have conversations around clinical trials on HIV prevention, treatment. A human rights-centered approach ensures meaningful involvement of adolescent girls and young women, and the young women collaborators were able to support the data from researchers with their own lived experiences.
Powering our movements by leveraging innovative use of social media
We’ve used the #WhatWomenWant and #WhatGirlsWant platforms for targeted advocacy and to facilitate
engagement, amplify voices of adolescent girls and young women, and work with allies and partners to hold
leaders accountable. From Jan -June 2019, we have:
- Gained over 350 followers on Twitter and increased our influence on Instagram
- Amplified digital content on women’s rights, HIV and SRHR to an audience of over 1 million across social media platforms
- Supported a digital community of 4,088 people composed of a majority of adolescent girls and young women from Eastern and Southern Africa to seed change in their own local communities
- Provided a model of feminist movement building by galvanizing action through the #WhatWomenWant campaign at key advocacy for a such as Women Deliver and Commission on the Status of Women, utilizing technology as a tool to advance SRHR in the broader context of health and gender equality and to ensure that young women are leading, informing, and shaping this work
Advancing human rights for all people living with HIV and ending stigma and discrimination
Ebony Johnson was selected and represents ATHENA as the Co-Lead on Education for The Global Partnership for Action to Eliminate All Forms of HIV- Related Stigma and Discrimination. The partnership creates an opportunity to harness the combined power of governments, civil society, bilateral and multilateral donors, academia and the United Nations to consign HIV-related stigma and discrimination to history. This dynamic partnership will initially focus on healthcare, education, workplace, legal and justice, family and community, and emergency and humanitarian settings. She serves alongside UNESCO focusing on issues including but not limited to SRHR, comprehensive sexuality education, rights-based approaches to foster health, and safe and constructive environments for students and educators.
In addition, we have continued our work to advance young women’s leadership through:
- Ongoing knowledge exchange, mentorship, advocacy, and coordination through our #WhatWomenWant, #WhatGirlsWant, and Ready to Lead WhatsApp platforms
- Refresher trainings in Zimbabwe led by Nyasha Sithole and Maximina Jokonya as part of a partnership with Frontline AIDS and ZY+ to build the leadership and advocacy of young women living with HIV to claim and advance their sexual and reproductive health and rights under the auspices of the Ready to Lead Project. Key priorities and considerations that have emerged from this work include a focus on mental health, and the specific needs of young women who are mothers as well as the specific needs of young women who are sex workers.
- Ongoing community mobilization, community dialogues, and peer to peer mentorship in Kenya under the #WhatGirlsWant banner that have included outreach through featured spots on national radio shows, engaging county decisionmakers, and expanding the focus of ICPD+25 preparations to consider the experiences of young women in informal settlements.
- Influencing the funding environment through networking at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; meet and greet opportunities between Global Fund for Women leadership and young women leading change in their communities in Kenya; and a working meeting with Peter Sands at Women Deliver with young women engaged in country implementation of Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in 5 priority countries in Eastern and Southern Africa.
In closing, we are powering up for an action-packed close to 2019. Our attention is focused on holding up the global architecture, namely the strength, integrity, and accountability of UNAIDS through this selection of a new Executive Director, as well as advancing local action for tangible change in the lives of individual adolescent girls and young women. We look to continue our work together, and as always, invite your ideas, passion, and expertise to the task.
Warm regards –
The ATHENA Team