PHA-Exchange> AIDS SCOURGE IN AFRICA SHOWS URGENT NEED FOR NEW WOMEN'S AGENCY: UN ENVOY

[Claudio]

From: "Vern Weitzel" <vern.weitzel at undp.org>

From: UNNews at un.org
Reply-To: UNNews at un.org

AIDS SCOURGE IN AFRICA SHOWS URGENT NEED FOR NEW WOMEN’S AGENCY: UN ENVOY
New York, Mar 17 2006  6:00PM
Lesotho and Swaziland are “gasping for survival” amidst the HIV/AIDS
pandemic, the United Nations
special envoy for the disease in Africa said today, repeating his call for
setting up an
international women’s agency to deal with the discrimination that has
allowed the global scourge to
ravage the continent.

Briefing reporters in New York on his trip last month to both countries,
Stephen Lewis, UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, said it
was “impossible to
traverse the continent of Africa…without an enveloping sense of horror and
despair at the carnage
amongst women.”

Describing himself as “frantic” over the slow response to the devastation,
Mr. Lewis said: “Things
are changing on the ground so incrementally – Lesotho and Swaziland are but
symbols for the greater
whole – that we’re losing millions of young women in Africa. In the process,
we’re creating a
generation of orphans whose lives are lives of torment.”

Swaziland continues to have the highest prevalence rate in the world at 42.6
per cent. In its recent
antenatal survey of pregnant women between the ages of 25 and 29, the
prevalence rate was 56.3 per
cent, Mr. Lewis said. “That’s the highest prevalence I have ever seen
registered in any age group
anywhere. The mind fractures at the thought of it.”

Mr. Lewis said that such a “terrifying” HIV prevalence rate among this age
group of pregnant women
was a stark reminder of “the meaning of gender inequality,” adding that
these and similar grim
statistics gave rise in both countries to an overwhelming “deluge of
orphans.”

He decried the “legacy of inequality which drives the virus and leads to the
devastation of the
women and girls of the continent” calling it “an omnibus catalogue of women’
s vulnerability: rape
and sexual violence, including marital rape; domestic violence.”

An impassioned Mr. Lewis declared that “if there was a powerful
international force for women, we
would not be in this galling predicament, if there was an international
agency for women.”

He called for an agency on the scale of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF),
arguing that while the
current agencies dealing with women’s affairs – including the UN Development
Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) – were performing well, a larger
organization was needed.

“What we now have in place – whether it’s UNFPA or UNIFEM or the Division
for the Advancement of
Women – cannot do the job that needs to be done. This is not to disparage
their good work; this is
only to say that it has to be combined and then enhanced a hundred-fold.”

However, he warned that the “United Nations doesn’t seem to understand this
truth,” citing as
evidence the recent appointment of a 15-person high-level panel examining
the issues of development,
humanitarian assistance and the environment which now has only two female
members.

Decrying this ratio, he urged efforts to expand the panel’s membership, and
to have “absolute
transparency in its proceedings,” adding that it must also be open for
submissions from women’s groups.