Unleashing our Potential: Transforming How we Engage Women and Girls, Advance Gender Equality, and Respond to HIV

Unleashing our Potential: Transforming How we Engage Women and Girls, Advance Gender Equality, and Respond to HIV

On July 16-17, 2015, the ATHENA Network and the Women’s Research Initiative on HIV/AIDS (WRI) convened a meeting to address the importance of engaging women and girls in the global response to HIV. The meeting was held at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, WA. Attendees included women living with HIV, policymakers, researchers, funders and advocacy organizations. Dawn Averitt, founder of the WRI, and E. Tyler Crone, co-founder and coordinating director of ATHENA hosted the convening and charged the group with addressing the following objectives:

Understand why the HIV epidemic continues to flourish in women and girls and why strategies-to-date have not adequately mobilized women and girls to be a part of the

  • Identify successful approaches to operationally engage women and girls in all our diversity across the entirety of the HIV movement, including key decision-making
  • Develop a set of action items to seed implementation of the identified approaches
  • Enhance alliances to more effectively coordinate ongoing efforts to engage women and girls and advance gender equality
  • Identify tactics to highlight and demonstrate successful practices and lessons learned in the operational engagement of women and girls at the center of the HIV response to share with the broader health and development fields

Find out more in the event summary report, and check out the participants who attended.