Women’s Prevention Summit champions female-controlled interventions
The third biennial national Women’s HIV Prevention Summit, held in Johannesburg in early September, highlighted the need for a women-centred HIV prevention agenda. Under the theme “Violations against Women”, the two-day summit discussed three sub-themes to address research, programmatic and structural interventions needed to reduce the rate of new HIV infections amongst South African women.
The Women’s HIV Prevention Summit brings together members of the Women’s Sector to provide a platform for information sharing, engagement and capacity building between the HIV social and scientific research, policy, and service sector communities in order to strengthen evidence-based, women-centred prevention strategies and advocacy responses for a prevention agenda aimed at women in South Africa.
The summit resulted in a number of priority actions to follow through moving forward:
- Establish a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities (DoWCPD) to drive a women-centred HIV response and increase accountability of government departments beyond the DoH.
- Investigate the procurement, distribution and social marketing of female condoms.
- Hold provincial workshops and dialogues on termination of pregnancy and contraception. The workshops should address and emphasise the need to integrate sexual and reproductive health rights and HIV and rather than looking at issues in silos, develop a holistic approach in addressing women’s health.
- Scale up responses and interventions that address the epidemic of violence against women in the country as a national HIV Prevention priority.
- Advocate for greater investment into new prevention technologies such as microbicides and vaccines and increase citizen involvement and buy-in for this research. The Women’s Sector needs to engage researchers in an agenda for new technologies, including hormonal contraceptions, microbicides and new generations of female condoms.
- Step up an advocacy campaign around ARV stock-outs, which is critical to HIV prevention. There is a need for an action plan on raising awareness on new prevention technologies.
- Include women with disabilities in our responses.
- Our responses should have a focus on young women and young people in order to ensure that we have future leaders. We need to localise the ZAZI campaign to address key issues for young women.
- Make visible information on post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), including rights about how and where to access them.
- There is an urgent need to host inter-generational dialogues amongst younger and older women.
Moving forward, the game changer lies in our ability to establish mechanisms that are safe, practical and led by the next generation in order to address the vulnerability of young women and girls.
Since the Summit the DoWCPD has met with the Women’s Sector to start discussions on how to address the effects of HIV on young women and identify current needs. The Women’s Sector also joined key regional women and civil society organisations at a Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (WRHI) meeting in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, to inform the proposed ECHO Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) study on hormonal contraception.
Content supplied by the SANAC Women’s Sector