Communities taking the lead in advocacy
Communities taking the lead in advocacy
To achieve lasting positive change, policies and funding decisions should reflect the needs of communities. Through our advocacy loop, we link up country, regional and global advocacy that is fully informed by communities’ advocacy priorities and country-level evidence.
The Advocacy Loop
Our advocacy approach is based on ensuring a continuous loop linking the efforts of national and regional activists with those of global activists and guaranteeing their mutual accountability. The advocacy loop facilitates evidence from communities to inform local, national, regional, and global advocacy and vice versa.
What does it look like in practice? Here's how!
Influencing the UN High-Level Meeting on AIDS
The UN Member States negotiations were directly informed by the input of communities. The Political Declaration that was adopted by Member States at the High-Level Meeting includes a number of critical targets and commitments that were advocated for by communities and is now a critical advocacy tool for communities to hold their governments accountable for implementing these targets.
Making UHC Work for the HIV Response
Recently, country-level policy research was conducted with the full involvement of communities to assess their countries’ progress towards achieving universal health coverage (UHC) and how it is affecting the HIV response. By fully including communities in the research their expertise and capacity were built around UHC and opportunities were created for evidence-based UHC advocacy at the country, regional and global levels.
Opening doors locally through global engagements
During the UN High-Level Political Forum on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), community representatives highlighted the damaging consequences of criminalising laws for key populations. Beyond that, they highlighted the most effective approaches to combatting stigma, discrimination, violence and inequality to achieve the SDGs. As a direct result of the bold intervention by an Indonesian community partner, they got an invitation from the Indonesian government for further dialogue on these issues, where this door had previously been closed.
Community speakers on advancing rights-based responses to HIV-AIDS at the UN
How do we advance rights-based responses to HIV-AIDS in the UN? What is necessary? In this video, community speakers from the #LoveAlliance talk about challenges, the changes that they see, and what needs to happen for the HIV response. An important tool is our newly launched HIV Language Compendium, find out more about it here.