Context
While the scope and damage of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa humbles institutions the world over, while the United Nations declares HIV/AIDS as the single largest obstacle to meeting the Millennium Development Goals, and while various well-meaning luminaries fervently call for expanded responses to AIDS, ordinary people in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to cope with the virus and its consequences.

Long before the AIDS pandemic was a topic of public discussion and concern, grassroots communities had already developed innovative coping mechanisms to provide care and support for infected and affected families, to educate people, to empower women and men to be able to act on their knowledge and to sustain community development.

As of today, grassroots women are the primary prevention, care and treatment system for AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Women and girls give home-based care, including palliative care, treatment for opportunistic infections and psychosocial counseling. They initiate locally-appropriate and culturally-sensitive stigma-reduction and awareness-raising campaigns, provide nutritional counseling and promote food security. They also link to the services that do exist - including clinics and hospitals, mortuaries, feeding programs and to resources such as bursary funds for orphans and community development funds, and build partnerships with local authorities, thereby addressing HIV/AIDS as all-encompassing, rather than just a health issue.

Yet despite growing attention and resources being devoted to the AIDS pandemic, particularly in Africa, these community-based activities remain the primary initiatives actually reaching families at the grassroots level. Current systems for channeling funding to HIV/AIDS responses are not reaching communities or the priorities grassroots practitioners are surfacing.

Members of the Huairou Commission recognize that the current situation is not tenable, that without a change in funding structures and priorities, the pandemic will continue to grow, women will burn out and their numbers will dwindle. So they have organized themselves and linked with like-minded partners to ensure that grassroots women, their priorities, practices and voices, are placed at the center of the global AIDS response.