Women Meet to Create an AIDS 2016 Platform at Pan-African Women's Reproductive Summit

Women Now 2016! Summit co-chair Prudence Mabele shows off The Ring. Photo: Hilary Beard 

Despite many scientific and biomedical advances, Black women worldwide are acquiring HIV at an alarming rate. In an effort to shift the global conversation to include Black women's needs, on July 13-15, the Women Now! 2016 preconference to the 21st International AIDS Conference took place in Durban, South Africa.

Women from 17 nations throughout Africa and the African Diaspora gathered in Durban prior to the International AIDS Conference to take an intersectional look at Black women and HIV, sexual health and reproductive justice and agree upon how to heighten the women's agenda at the International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016).

"The purpose is to represent the voice of women of African descent and the issues that we want to ensure are prioritized at AIDS 2016," says co-chair Dázon Dixon Diallo of the Women Now 2016! Pan-African Women's Summit on HIV, Reproductive Rights and Justice. Diallo is founder and president of SisterLove Inc., an Atlanta-based reproductive-justice organization with ties to South Africa.

For two-and-a-half days, organizers and women living with HIV from Africa and the African Diaspora gathered to discuss women's role in fighting and ending the epidemic, discussing issues such as race, economic status, gender equality, women's empowerment, gender-based trauma and violence, sexual- and reproductive-health rights, and social justice.

"This is the first time in the history of the International AIDS Conference that women of color from around the globe have had an opportunity to come together and discuss issues that directly impact and affect them," said co-chair Yvette Raphael, a human rights and HIV activist currently working at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Communication Impact South Africa and co-founder of the Tshwaranang Care Center for People Living With AIDS in South Africa "It is also different because it is a meeting uniquely organized by women for women," including conference co-chair and activist Prudence Mabele, founder of the Positive Women's Network, Raphael adds.

Women are pushing the issue of race to the forefront of the international AIDS agenda because it isn't getting the attention it deserves in the conversation around key populations, Diallo says. "It's not enough to only talk about men who have sex with men, but instead, men of African descent who have sex with men. Among women, it's Black women who are still most impacted."

Sessions ranged from those on the promising research on the dapirivine ring, a flexible, silicone ring that slowly releases antiretroviral medication, which women would insert into their vagina once a month for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), to a reproductive-health empowerment session where Diallo showed women how to view their own cervix.

The Summit closed with a strong call to action.

"Women have the strong voice, women have the skills, women have the experience to implement programs," said Linda Mafu, the head of civil society and political advocacy at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. "But somehow women are project officers, women are volunteers and when the CEO position comes, women become assistant program managers, and who's going to implement that program? It's the woman. Who's going to then report on that program so that the CEO can go and report somewhere else? It's the woman. So in this world women's conference, all of you have a response to go to the International AIDS Conference and make sure that whatever came here gets to that agenda."

Attendees then voted on a series of declarations to push forward at the International AIDS Conference, which will later be followed by an extensive report.

Hilary Beard is a Philadelphia-based writer and the coauthor of "Health First!: The Black Woman's Wellness Guide."