To support the capacity of countries to integrate human rights in their Fast-Track approaches to HIV programming, UNAIDS and the Alliance Nationale Contre le Sida (ANCS) Senegal held a three-day capacity building workshop in Dakar, Senegal from 22 to 24 June 2015.

The workshop highlighted the continued political, legal, cultural, social, and programmatic challenges that hinder efforts to address the HIV epidemic. Participants pointed out that existing programmes to address these challenges in Western and Central African countries remain largely insufficient and inadequate.

According to participants, human rights, gender equality and the involvement of people living with HIV and key populations are often cited in HIV planning documents. Yet, they are rarely translated into specific human rights programmes. And where these programmes are included in the national HIV planning documents, they are not addressed at the costing and budgeting phase, there are little metrics to track progress, and when implemented, these programmes are often not evaluated or taken to scale.

Participants

The workshop brought together more than 50 participants from 10 countries across Western and Central Africa including Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal.

Participants included decision makers and technical experts involved in HIV strategic planning at country level, officials from national AIDS commissions, Ministries of Health and Justice, people living with HIV and other key populations and community-based organizations. A wide range of technical and other partners including UNDP, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and the Technical Support Facility for west and central Africa also participated in the workshop.

This workshop was the seventh and last in the series of regional workshops held since 2011, with support from the Ford Foundation.  

Key messages

• Participants stressed the importance of the workshop in highlighting approaches and tools for ensuring the inclusion of programmes to advance human rights and gender equality.

• The workshop led to the elaboration by each country team of a national action plan with specific commitments to integrate human rights and gender programmes in their national AIDS response that clearly spells out partners and timelines for its implementation.

• The meeting concluded with the development and endorsement of the “Dakar Declaration on scaling up the HIV response, realizing the human rights and full access to services for everyone in West and Central Africa” in which participants committed to specific actions in their respective countries to advance evidence-informed and rights-based programmes in national HIV responses.