High on the agenda for the women is to identify solutions to challenges faced daily such as stigma and discrimination, unaffordable health care, gender inequality, economic empowerment and sexual and reproductive rights. In addition to addressing challenges the women will come together to offer support and celebrate the leadership that they have shown thus far and define a clear strategy for moving their agenda forward.
Due to the profound stigma and discrimination experienced by some positive women, it is often at events like the Positive Women’s Forum where HIV status is first disclosed. For many HIV positive women, meetings such as the Positive Women’s Forum are the only place they receive meaningful support. "Hearing others stories of surmounting seemingly impossible challenges, coping with unbearable loss to become warriors in a shared front in this war gives us the strength to raise our own voices back home,” says Lynde Francis, Director and founder of The Center and a speaker at the Positive Women’s Forum.
“I got the courage to become an activist from my first People Living With HIV (PLWH) conference in Cape Town in 1993,” shares Lynde, a long-term activist with ICW, “One of the most remarkable things about attending meetings like these is the amazing sense of community experienced by women from the most diverse backgrounds. Women from Russia, India, China, Africa and Europe find that they have much more in common with each other than that which separates them.” Lynde, from Zimbabwe, celebrates 21 year since her diagnosis and is currently expecting her 10th grandchild.
Attended exclusively by positive women, the Forum will encourage participants to engage and mobilise strategies around common issues, to share successes in order to minimise duplication in programmes and ensure that successful plans of actions are adopted to meet the needs of positive women and girls in different cultures and communities.
“We hope to further unite the positive women’s movement to move the HIV and AIDS agenda forward for positive women. We also hope to nurture new leadership and partnerships between the YWCAs and the positive women’s movement,” says Sophie Dilmitis, World YWCA HIV and AIDS Coordinator, who has lead the organising team in preparation for the Forum.
The World YWCA is hosting the Positive Women’s Forum, organized in partnership with the International Community of Women Living with HIV and AIDS (ICW). The Forum will open the International Women’s Summit in Nairobi, Kenya on July 4, 2007.
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