Community Mobilization to Promote and Protect the Sexual and Reproductive Rights of Women Living with HIV in Latin America.

Between 2009 and 2014, the International Community of Women Living with HIV in Latin America and the Mexican feminist civil society organization Balance coordinated a five-country community-led intervention that brought together women living with HIV (WLHIV), trans women, sex workers, and feminist lawyers to document and respond to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) violations of WLHIV and advocate for legal, policy, and programmatic changes to fulfill SRHR. The experiences of involved community leaders (n=26) indicate that knowledge of national, regional, and international human rights commitments and up-to-date medical information positively influenced personal health behaviors, empowered WLHIV as subject matter experts, and emboldened them to hold duty-bearers to account. The research evidence generated through collective action was critical for legitimating SRHR violations of WLHIV with decision-makers and for positioning the issue in the advocacy agendas of national and regional HIV and women's movements. Collective action contributed to social cohesion among diverse groups of women living with and affected by HIV and increased available technical, financial, and organizational resources and political opportunities by linking organizations and networks. Collectively, community leaders mobilized to influence policy, legal frameworks, and service delivery to promote and protect the SRHR of WLHIV.

In Women's Eyes: Key Barriers to Women's Access to HIV Treatment and a Rights-Based Approach to their Sustained Well-Being.

There is rightly a huge global effort to enable women living with HIV to have long productive lives, through treatment access. However, many women living with HIV experience violence against women (VAW), in both domestic and health care settings. The ways in which VAW might prevent treatment access and adherence for women has not to date been reviewed coherently at the global level, from women's own perspectives. Meanwhile, funding for global health care, including HIV treatment, is shrinking. To optimize women's health and know how best to optimize facilitators and minimize barriers to access and adherence, especially in this shrinking funding context, we need to understand more about these issues from women's own perspectives. In response, we conducted a three-phase review: (1) a literature review (phase one); (2) focus group discussions and interviews with nearly 200 women living with HIV from 17 countries (phase two); and (3) three country case studies (phase three). The results presented here are based predominantly on women's own experiences and are coherent across all three phases. Recommendations are proposed regarding laws, policies, and programs which are rights-based, gendered, and embrace diversity, to maximize women's voluntary, informed, confidential, and safe access to and adherence to medication, and optimize their long-term sexual and reproductive health.