The theme of this year’s World AIDS Day is leadership. We recognize that leadership occurs at many levels. While leadership and unswerving commitment of national and global policy makers to stem the insidious HIV pandemic is essential, we also need to ensure that leadership from communities of those most affected is valued and promoted. The voices and experiences of women and girls affected and infected by the pandemic are critical for devising policies and services that can reverse the pandemic. Together, both forms of leadership can shake the status quo and enable us to envision a world free of HIV and AIDS.

We need this kind of joint leadership by women living with HIV, and those speaking out on their behalf, to demand greater awareness of women’s and men’s different needs for HIV prevention, treatment, care and support. Despite encouraging news from UNAIDS that suggests a leveling off in the percentage of people living with HIV/AIDS and a falling number of new infections, AIDS remains a leading cause of death worldwide. As the devastating toll of the AIDS epidemic continues worldwide, women’s rates of infection have equaled those of men in most places, and surpassed them in some.

Statistics tell us that more women are being infected, but they mask the extent to which women are affected: by the overwhelming responsibility for care, to raise children orphaned by AIDS, and the struggle to sustain already fragile livelihoods. It is a picture held up to us daily by women leaders at local, national, regional and global levels lobbying for policies and services that take women’s needs and interests into account. But too often their voices are heard from the margins rather than the centre: In fewer than 10 percent of the 79 countries surveyed by UNAIDS in 2006 did women participate fully in the development of national AIDS plans. Voices and demands of women need to be incorporated into the decisions, policies, and strategies agreed upon and implemented at all levels, recognizing and respecting their leadership.

Women’s leadership in addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic is emerging at all levels. The Global Coalition on Women and AIDS, the Women Won’t Wait Campaign, the Nairobi 2007 Call to Action are examples of women taking action to call attention to women’s priorities and perspectives for stemming the pandemic. Government and community-based leaders are also creating innovative strategies to address the inter -linkages between violence against women and HIV/AIDS with support from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women that UNIFEM manages in partnership with many UN organizations and outside experts. In 2007, the Trust Fund is supporting nine initiatives in Africa and Latin America and the Russian Federation that are involving faith-based leaders, health professionals, public authorities, paralegals, judges and prosecutors at national and community level to take action with women’s networks and community-based organizations to address these twin pandemics.

UNIFEM urges leaders to take steps to empower women by recognizing their contributions. Women are confronting the challenges of HIV and AIDS in communities worldwide. They are asking that the policies, programmes and funds provided for HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment and care, work for women equally with men. This is the message women are sending from their communities. This is the message we must take to the world.