Empower Women, Save Lives: Women and AIDS U.S. Tour

The "Empower Women, Save Lives: Women and AIDS U.S. Tour" drew on the participation of prominent, "inspiring" women to engage in face-to-face meetings and public events that promoted increasing girls' access to education, reducing violence against women, providing increased economic opportunities for women, protecting women's property and inheritance rights, and ensuring access to female-controlled contraceptive methods.

Communication approaches spanning the 5-city tour included:

• Engaging the media - for example, a New York discussion was held with a select group of "influential women media elites from each of the major U.S. television stations". This event was designed to provide an opportunity to discuss ways in which mainstream media can support women and AIDS efforts through continued news coverage of the issue. As a follow-up, during a segment broadcast on the television show "Good Morning America", Diane Sawyer interviewed UNAIDS Deputy Director Dr. Kathleen Cravero (who was joined on the show by other tour participants). Later, a luncheon included more than 100 senior executives from the full spectrum of Time Warner media properties (film, television, cable, internet, and publishing) for a discussion about ways to increase coverage of women and AIDS issues.
• Engaging religious leaders - for example, a community forum hosted by the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville engaged religious leaders from various faiths in an open community dialogue about the vulnerabilities women and girls face in a world with AIDS, solutions that work in reducing this vulnerability, and the essential role of the religious community in the AIDS response.
• Engaging young people - for example, a Miami event brought together students from the University of Miami and the local community for a forum and facilitated town hall discussion to highlight the impact of AIDS on young people, especially young women, and the need to take more action at college campus level on this issue. The event included a youth AIDS information fair at which student groups and community youth organisations made education materials available and sought to enlist their peers in tackling AIDS. Similarly, a Chicago town hall meeting drew both students from North Central College, located in rural Chicago, and women from local organisations for a focused discussion on how to make women and AIDS a U.S. foreign policy priority.
• Engaging community members - for example, a Nashville forum brought together public health experts and women living with HIV and AIDS to discuss the barriers that make it difficult for women in the U.S. and worldwide to access essential HIV prevention and treatment services through traditional public health facilities. And in Miami, a roundtable discussion connected representatives from local community-based AIDS service providers and people living with HIV and AIDS with tour participants - placing particular emphasis on AIDS outreach programmes to low-income, minority women and adolescent girls.
• Engaging prominent personnel - in various cities, "VIP receptions" were held to address representatives from major women's organisations, key business leaders, philanthropists, locally-elected officials, and civic leaders.
• Engaging policymakers - for example, in Washington, D.C., participants reported on the tour to the U.S. Congress and explored actions that could be taken to increase the responsiveness of U.S. global AIDS policy to the realties faced by women and girls. Among the participants were Senators Orrin Hatch and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Judy Woodruff of CNN's "Inside Politics" moderated the session, and selections from the World Vision-sponsored photo exhibit by Soenke Weiss and AIDS quilts by artist Mary Fisher were on display. Following this, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Randall Tobias hosted a meeting of heads of U.S. government programmes that reach out to women to discuss ways in which these programmes can be connected to and coordinated with U.S. global AIDS funding to help create comprehensive programmes for women "on the ground" in countries most impacted by AIDS.

Online advocacy - in the form of a statement of support - enabled individuals to promise to take action "in my community and around the globe. I support solutions that can make a difference and urge all leaders - public and private - to fight AIDS in a way that works for women and girls everywhere..." In this way, information and community technology (ICT) was used to engage members of the global public, even those who were not able to attend the USA-based events.

Women, HIV/AIDS, Development Assistance.

GCWA notes that nearly 20 million women worldwide are living with HIV. According to Dr. Kathleen Cravero, Deputy Executive Director of UNAIDS (as reported by the Miami Herald on March 6 2005), "Efforts to reach women and girls are a good start but not nearly enough. In many parts of the world, women not only lack information, but also the social and economic options they need to keep themselves and their families safe from AIDS...." GCWA would agree: "In all regions of the world, women are getting infected not only because they lack information, but because they lack the power to keep themselves safe. If more women and girls had the 'right to abstain'; to decide when and with whom they have sex; to negotiate condom use; to live their lives free from violence; to earn incomes adequate to feed their families - their ability to protect themselves from HIV would be real. Far too often, however, they don't."