September 03, 2008

"The International AIDS Conference, which closed on August 8, was largely focused on scientific research (particularly anti-retroviral treatment), so-called vulnerable groups (including transgender people, men who have sex with men, commercial sex workers and injecting drug users), and calls for top-down health system reform by high-level players such as the Clinton and Gates Foundations. Amid these themes, the Huairou Commission and its partners focused on the realities of HIV and AIDS as a development issue, as it affects the lives of those who are most affected by the disease – grassroots women living and working in their own poor communities, caring for the infected and affected on a daily basis.

Within a conference bringing together 25,000 people from around the world, the Huairou Commission strategically worked with its partners, in particular the Stephen Lewis Foundation and CORDAID, to ensure that the issues and priorities of grassroots women were voiced within the Conference, and to ensure that like-minded partners and organizations were able to come together to discuss these issues and forge plans for a way forward to ensure that they would remain on the global agenda.

For at least 10 years grassroots women, particularly in Africa, have struggled to get the world to understand AIDS as a development issue – which is how they experience it every day – to have their lived realities inform global policy on AIDS, and to get their contributions to fighting AIDS in their communities recognized local to global. We were therefore shocked to find an overwhelming focus by influential multi and bilateral agencies on human rights (de-linked from a sustainable development perspective) as the framework for AIDS interventions, and a centering of the voices of minority vulnerable groups, removed from the context of poor communities in which these groups often live.

We sought to use this Conference to bring together partners who have supported the work of home-based caregivers and other grassroots women who have organized and built networks in response to the pandemic, and to ensure our focus remained clearly on the needs and priorities of these grassroots women leaders. We did this through two strategic events – a strategy session on home-based care, and a reception for grassroots women and girls and their partners.

On Wednesday, August 6, the Huairou Commission hosted “Beyond Unpaid Caregiving: Strategic Partnering to Support and Sustain Grassroots Women’s Groups’ Home-Based Care Work (in the Context of HIV),” an invitation only event co-organized with GROOTS International, CORDAID and UNDP with support from the UNDP-Japan Partnership Fund (WID/GAD). The session brought together home-based caregivers with partners from foundations (CORDAID, Stephen Lewis Foundation, AJWS, the African Women’s Development Fund), multi- and bilateral agencies (the World Bank AIDS Campaign Team for Africa, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs), UNDP and UNIFEM representatives, and NGOs (AIDS Free World, HelpAge International, VSO, Health Gap AWOMI). Our broad goal for the session was to explore how we can partner and what plans we can make to raise the visibility of home-based caregivers, support them to organize for impact and to leverage social, political and institutional recognition for home-based caregivers.

The session was facilitated on behalf of the Huairou Commission by Sandy Schilen, Global Facilitator of GROOTS International, and Esther Mwaura-Muiru, National Coordinator of GROOTS Kenya. They opened the session by describing the development of our home-based care work within GROOTS International and the Huairou Commission, and particularly on the growth of the Home-Based Care Alliance since the idea was spawned in 2003 at ICASA in Nairobi and the role of partners in the development of the Alliance.

Although our AIDS Campaign and the home-based care work that forms the core of that Campaign has been focused thus far on Africa, this workshop reflected our new support for affected groups in the Garifuna and Mayan areas of the Honduran Gulf to organize and link to their African sisters. We heard from Julia Dolmo and Ana Bonillo of Nuevo Amanacer, Honduras, Mary Ganiza of the Episcopal Council of Malawi, Mercy Ilusa and Violet Shivutse of GROOTS Kenya, Florence Enyogu of UCOBAC and Limota Goroso-Giwa of the International Women’s Communication Center. All of these women have been involved in creating holistic, comprehensive, women and community-led home-based care programs. They discussed their challenges, stemming from the fact that grassroots women are bearing the major burden of HIV and AIDS through their care work; how they have been able to organize for impact (including consolidation of caregivers’ voices, greater ability to access resources, linking in peer networks to share capacities and trainings) and building partnerships and their own advocacy and negotiation capacities to hold both government and civil society accountable to the needs of communities. They also discussed the continued need to win formal, institutional support for women’s work in these countries and to expand this kind of representational organizing in diverse and challenging parts of West and Southern Africa."

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