From the end of January and throughout February, the Tour will be visiting universities throughout the UK promoting the voices of young people affected by HIV and AIDS from across the world. Speakers this year include Beyonce Tushabe, a transgender woman from Uganda who works to speak out against the continued harassment and abuse transgender women face. Here is a link to some of the stories of our previous speakers who spoke about their experiences in the hope to raise awareness of the issues surrounding HIV and AIDS and inspire young people to campaign for everyone’s human right of access to healthcare and medicines.
In the last 15 years the HIV response has been revolutionised with the development of effective HIV treatment known as antiretroviral therapy (ART). ART has enabled people living with HIV to live a long and healthy life. However, whilst 8 million people do have access to HIV treatment, 7 million people worldwide still do not. Poor policies, constrained budgets, ineffective forms of treatment, high treatment prices and centralised health services are some of the reasons for this.
In 2011 world leaders came together at the UN High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS and made commitments to ensure that 15 million people were accessing HIV treatment by 2015. But In order to meet global commitments it means getting an additional 7 million people on treatment in less than 3 years. And to do that we need strong and effective policies that promote effective ART scale up and the financing to do it. Throughout our 2013 UK Speaker Tour we will be finding creative ways of campaigning for world leaders to keep the commitments they made in 2011 and this will include planning stunts to get passers-by, the media and politicians to take some notice. We are aiming to collect 7500 Action Cards by March 12th (our National Day of Action)- asking the UK government to implement a blueprint with targets to scale up HIV treatment and care, to fully fund the Global Fund and to implement a Robin Hood Tax.
As well as visiting Student Stop AIDS Societies around the country, the speakers will visit the House of Commons where they will be joined by Under Secretary of State for International Development Lynne Featherstone MP. Members are invited to attend Speaker Tour events in their area, see the flyer attached for the dates of all the universities we will be visiting. If you would like more information please contact kates@restlessdevelopment.org
