The NGO Delegation’s Report to the PCB will focus on the importance of involving communities – key and marginalized populations, people living with HIV, and other communities hard hit by the AIDS pandemic – in the HIV response. A topic that has long been discussed by multilateral organizations, donors, national governments, and of course, communities themselves. However, community leadership across planning, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and dissemination of HIV and other interventions remains limited, with communities still not being equitably or sustainably financed for their essential work as service providers, researchers, advocates, consultants, and leaders.
Communities are increasingly subject to government restrictions, leading to a shrinking civil society space. Additionally, while human rights violations and gender inequality have been barriers to ending AIDS since the earliest days of this pandemic, the emergence of focused and well-resourced anti-SRHR and anti-LGBT+ movements poses new challenges. Active in every region, anti-rights groups have become increasingly vociferous opponents of communities and community-led organizations, branding them as a danger to children, families, and society itself and campaigning directly against essential components of an effective HIV response, from condoms and PrEP to comprehensive sexuality education, alongside pushing a narrow, patriarchal and binary view of identity, sex and relationships that confounds harmful social and gender norms and is behind the push for new anti-gay laws in several countries, and the rollback on transgender rights.