UNAIDS' gender policy: strengths and weaknesses

Agenda for Country Level Accelerated Action on Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV

Shannon Olinyk – Michigan University, Ann Arbor, USAAndrew Gibbs – HEARD, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South

AfricaCatherine Campbell – Institute of Social Psychology, LSE, London, UK

Know your gendered epidemic

Ensure NSPs and other frameworks integrate gender equality meaningfully

Mobilisation of resources around women, girls and gender equality

Strengths and limitations

Strengths:1) Political space for

prioritizing women and girls

2) Engendering new alliances

“It has made sure we engage as partners in a joint way, together around a common platform.”

Limitations1) Lack of grassroots

participation

2) Insufficient resources and tools for implementing

3) Lack of political will within UNAIDS

It was a: “high-level thing that makes it look like they are doing a lot for women, but when you dig down, their efforts have been limited.”

Conclusions

The Agenda is strong in content and design, but has significant weaknesses in implementation – policy evaporation

However, we cannot understand the impact of the Agenda as solely about implementation, rather the processes of developing the Agenda and the Agenda itself seem to have had wider impacts in creating a political space for women, girls and gender equality in the response to HIV

Andrew Gibbs: gibbs@ukzn.ac.za