HIV and AIDS

Women in many countries are far less likely than men to own property and assets - key tools to gaining economic security and earning higher incomes. Though laws to protect women's property rights exist in most countries, gender and cultural constraints can prevent women from owning or inheriting property. In this series, ICRW suggests practical steps to promote, protect and fulfill women's property rights.

Other publications in this series:
Women's Property Rights as an AIDS Response, Emerging Efforts in South Asia
Women's Property Rights as an AIDS Response, Lessons from Community Interventions in Africa
Learning How to Better Promote, Protect and Fulfill Women's Property Rights
Mending the Gap Between Law and Practice, Organizational Approaches for Women's Property Rights
Connecting Rights to Reality: A Progressive Framework of Core Legal Protections for Women's Property Rights

This paper discusses research in Botswana and Zambia that found gaps in community knowledge about HIV transmission, particularly about mother to child transmission, and yielded insights into community perspectives about: the barriers to using voluntary counseling and testing services; the stigma and fear associated with HIV; traditional norms on breastfeeding; and the role of family and community members in women’s decisions to participate in programs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

In this report, ICRW, Kara Counseling and ZAMBART combine the findings from a key study of children's experiences of HIV-related stigma in Zambia with a study of stigma in the wider community to arrive at a holistic picture of children's experiences of HIV-related stigma and discrimination from the perspective of adults and children within the same communities.

This report provides background on international developments concerning anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs, and on U.S. policy on the issue. It also outlines the key elements identified by leading international organizations as essential for successful scale-up of ARV treatment.

From August 2002 through January 2004, the Institute for Social Development Studies and ICRW conducted research on HIV and AIDS-related stigma and discrimination in two Vietnamese cities: Can Tho and Hai Phong. This report provides an overview of the key insights from the fieldwork phase of the project.

Although knowledge and technologies exist in Uganda to better enable households to be food secure, agricultural sector programs are not promoting them as effectively as they could. Likewise, programs exist in the health and social welfare sectors to support HIV-affected households, but these do not generally incorporate the kinds of nutritional and agricultural know-how required to meet affected households' food security needs. This report provides recommendations on how these technical sectors, agriculture, health and nutrition, can be better integrated within communities to improve food security.

Does women's lack of property rights increases household poverty and their vulnerability to HIV infection? Would securing these rights mitigate the impoverishing impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic? This paper seeks to answer these questions and further examine the links between HIV/AIDS and women's property rights.

ICRW conducted a two-year research and advocacy project to review the effectiveness of the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Specifically, the project examined the inclusion of gender to strengthen decision making, operations and programs, and civil society's participation in the Global Fund. ICRW recommends key action steps for how the Global Fund can improve its overall effectiveness by building gender expertise into its operations and programs, and strengthening civil society's role in its decision making and governance. The recommendations and action points contained in this report build on and refine preliminary conclusions that ICRW developed in June 2004.

aids2031 is a consortium of partners who have come together to look at what we have learned about the AIDS response as well as consider the implications of the changing world around AIDS. ICRW is a co-convener of the social drivers group, a collaborative effort to examine the key political, social and economic “drivers” behind the epidemic. In this paper, the authors summarize the reports and recommendations from the meeting, Sex, Rights and the Law in a World with AIDS, which convened several leading organizations to explore why the AIDS response has made relatively little progress on the prevention of sexually transmitted HIV and what should be done to ensure a more effective long-term response.

This document presents strategies, program examples and research findings about how governments, the UN system, donors and civil society can make the reduction of HIV-related stigma and discrimination central in national responses to HIV/AIDS. Development partners – as they support national authorities and civil society partners in scaling up toward universal access – can inspire greater political, financial and programmatic commitment to address stigma and discrimination in national AIDS responses.