Women living with HIV - Ayu's story

Since 2014, UN Women in Indonesia has been conducting a number of initiatives that aims to strengthen the capacity and to increase leadership skills of Women Living with HIV and Women Key Affected Population in Indonesia. In 2014, UN Women established a gender forum for WLHIV that served as a platform to share, learn, discuss about women and HIV‘s issues and intervention and to identify issues and reccommendation for collective actions in influencing government program and policies on HIV response, including the National Strategic Plan on HIV and the Global Fund New Funding Mechanism.

Ayu Oktariani, a feminist who demonstrates strong commitment on promoting rights of women living with HIV. Photo: UN Women Indonesia

UN Women also works with network of women living with HIV to advocate for integration of VAW and HIV services. The objective of this integration is to address vulnerability of women to violence and discrimination in service setting due to their health status.

Recently, UN Women in partnership with the women positive network conducted training on Feminist Leadership for women living with HIV with the goal to strengthen solidarity and movement of the group to conduct more solid advocacy work in the future. Other capacity building organized by UN Women was a training on CEDAW. As a result, the HIV community developed a CEDAW shadow report highlighting issues of violence against women living with HIV.

Ayu Oktariani is actively involved in all above interventions where she demonstrated strong commitment on promoting rights of women living with HIV.