Speaking at the International Women’s Summit on Women’s Leadership and HIV and AIDS on July 7, 2007 on the topic ‘If women really matter, where’s the leadership and the money?’, Dr Kanyoro said that many women’s organisations struggled with accountability to boards and donors due to a lack of human and financial resources.

‘The women’s movement is very understaffed, if staffed at all, and not able to sustain running an off and being accountable to boards and donors’, she said.

Dr Kanyoro said an urgent priority must be to ‘staff our women’s organisations’ and ‘to scale up the rich work being done in communities’.

‘HIV is calling us to think bolder’, she said, and it requires women’s groups to expand their thinking towards the whole village and country rather than just isolated programmes.

Marie Bopp Allport from the Pacific Islands AIDS Foundation also stressed the importance of accountability in the work being done on HIV and AIDS and promoted the concept of power sharing. ‘Power is not only something that men do, women seek it too and we need to learn to pass it on’, she said.

The lack of funding for the women’s movement was also highlighted by Zawadi Nyong’o from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), who argued that ‘a lot of women’s organisations are in a state of survival and existence’. She noted that 66% of women’s groups that participated in a recent AWID survey had annual budgets of less than USD $50,000.

Ms Nyong’o noted a concerning trend that ‘small organisations are staying small and bigger organisations are getting bigger’. She stressed the importance of building the sustainability of women’s movements and that ‘we cannot engage in women’s rights work, unless we have money’.

Bisi Adeleye Fayemi, Executive Director of the African Women’s Development Fund called on women to ‘fund our own revolution’. Sharing the example of the 13 Campaign established by the Fund to support African women’s work on HIV and AIDS, Ms Adeleye Fayemi said ‘African women are taking their own destiny into their hands’. She called on women wherever they are to take leadership and raise resources for their important work.

The advice from the Ford Foundation’s Terry McGovern is that women’s groups need to be more specific about what they want to achieve. ‘The gains that have been made have been targeted campaigns, and women have been at the forefront in collaboration with others’, she said. Ms McGovern urged that working from a rights based approach needed to include advocacy to change laws and go beyond exploring intersections.

Sono Aibe from the Packard Foundation called for increased investment in sexual and reproductive services arguing that ‘through these services women will come into contact with the health system, learn about their bodies and how they can prevent HIV’. Arguing that global funding does not take the reality of women and girls into consideration, she called for stronger advocacy for policies that respect women and girls and their rights.

Patricia Mugambi Ndegwa from the Global Business Coalition against HIV and AIDS said that business could play a greater role in resourcing the AIDS response. ‘Business is doing a fraction of what it can do’, she argued, saying that more could be done by companies in the areas of workplace policy, sharing of expertise, advocacy and philanthropy.

Full speeches are available from the World YWCA website.