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COMMENTARY: Fighting AIDS with Women   
Dec. 1, 2006—Many of the world’s AIDS experts and activists spent 2006 discussing the latest news in policy, treatment and prevention of this devastating disease. At more than 400 sessions at the International AIDS Conference in August, researchers examined some 4,500 scientific papers and heard personal accounts of the reality faced by the 39.5 million people now living with HIV worldwide. At the United Nations in May, governments debated what was working and what still needed to be done to confront the pandemic that was discovered 25 years ago. What was the consensus from these debates? How do we move forward? I suggest we focus on women. HIV/AIDS was first diagnosed in men in 1981, but now nearly half of those living with it are women. In 2002, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that in Africa, “AIDS now has a woman’s face.” That fact is now true worldwide.
This is in part for physiological reasons. New technologies are being developed to address these causes. But the social ones are the ones that are most pernicious. Women are affected disproportionately, because they lack the power to protect themselves. Most do not practice high-risk behavior yet their rates of infection are often higher than that of men. In addition, women feel the impact of the disease most substantially on their lives. In countries where women have few legal or inheritance rights, for example, widows of men who die of AIDS may be forced to marry their in-laws. Or they may be evicted by those in-laws, lose their children and be made homeless.
To stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, the world spent more than $8 billion last year, compared to a mere $300 million a decade ago. UNAIDS says we ought to be spending $15 billion this year, and more each year into the future. But are we spending enough of it on women? Women and girls must have equal access to programs of HIV prevention, treatment and care. Poverty and stigma keep too many away. New investments should include comprehensive reproductive health education for women as well as men, greater resources to develop and distribute woman-initiated methods of HIV protection, such as female condoms and new microbicide formulations; and a commitment to get more women into decision-making roles about programs and policies to fight HIV. These priorities matched with efforts to increase women’s empowerment will make a critical difference, including family planning programs, programs to achieve equal access to education for girls, give women property and inheritance rights, protect them from violence and offer access to job training and credit. This pandemic is fueled by poverty, discrimination and violence against women. Success will only come when each and every leader—from community-based service providers to heads of state—put women at the center of efforts to confront the epidemic. Learn more about CEDPA's work to fight AIDS around the world.
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The numbers are there to see: young women in sub-Saharan Africa are three times more likely to be living with HIV than young men. In the United States, AIDS is the leading cause of death for African-American women age 25 to 34. More than half the adults living with HIV in the Caribbean are women. The new bottom line is this: women are now more vulnerable to HIV than men. 
Young girls are particularly vulnerable: they are the first to be taken out of school to tend the sick or their siblings; far too many are married off at puberty or younger to older, sexually experienced men; or they may become prey to “sugar daddies” in exchange for food for their families, school fees and living expenses. Some of this year’s conference papers documented the staggering proportion of young girls whose first sexual experience is coerced—up to one third, according to some reports. 
