Along with roughly 500 others, I attended the SAfAIDS/ZAN meeting at the Harare International Conference Centre (HICC). The regional meeting provided feedback form the International AIDS Conference held in Mexico in August 2008. In addition to 14 plenary speakers and a poster exhibition at HICC, there were six thematic breakaway sessions (children; women and gender; clinical research; PLHIV; youth; faith-based responses; workplace programmes). Across the breakaway sessions, 23 individual presentations were on the agenda, and as I understand it, each was a repeat performance of a presentation given in Mexico. I’m not sure what to make of the notion that at least 23 Zimbabweans were in Mexico – Is that excessive? Is that insufficient? I don’t know.

In any event, I attended the women and gender session and was intrigued by a comment regarding a non-Zimbabwean paper presented in Mexico which compared adult HIV prevalence data with gender gap data. Intrigued by what comparing the data reveals, and perhaps more intrigued by the way the comment seemed to encourage the audience to feel threatened by the comparison. Read more

This entry was posted on October 20th, 2008 at 12:57 pm by Susan Pietrzyk and is filed under Uncategorized, Women's issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.