In many societies, women are facing serious social, economic, cultural, moral and religious barriers to access to information on the disease, to protective measures and to medication to slow it development in the event of contamination.

Apart from the purely medical consequences of the AIDS pandemic, another concern is the psychological aspect of the problem, manifest in the way society responds to HIV-positive people. We must work together to avoid isolating HIV-infected people from everyday social life. A top priority for us all must be protecting the social and economic rights of individuals and preventing discrimination against them.

Inequalities between the sexes, societies and continents must be eliminated to halt the epidemic’s spread

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant socio-economic impact. In terms of the economy there has been a decline in state tax revenue, budget deficit and public services. Rising poverty means deeper vulnerabilities and social inequalities. Unfortunately, women pay a higher price. Poverty is a key issue because it deeply affects, especially women in rural areas. Many women rely on the often-unstable earnings of their spouses. Curfews, lockdowns and borders closures disrupted incoming-generating activities, causing dramatic economic vulnerability for women – the pandemic depleted household economies.

Women are socially disadvantaged in controlling sexual access to their bodies through socialization to customs that define a woman's body as for sexual use by men. Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial.

Worldwide, AIDS remains the biggest killer of women aged 15–49 years. To end AIDS by 2030, we must end gender-based violence, inequality and insecurity and we must ensure that women and girls have equal access to education, health and employment. We need to transform our societies so that no one is second class and everyone’s human rights are respected. AIDS cannot be beaten while marginalized communities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people, people who inject drugs and sex workers, live in fear of the state or of socially sanctioned violence and abuse. Beating AIDS depends on tackling all forms of discrimination. I want to thank all the brave and determined social justice movements who are the true leaders in this work. I salute you.

A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a that, historically, have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm.

The prevailing situation of women across the continent includes economic exclusion, low level of representation in decision-making organs; sexual and gender based violence, poor access to justice, school dropouts, cultural norms, among others.

Moreover, women transmit the virus when giving birth, and so have an especially important role to play in fighting the propagation of AIDS. “It is vital to target women through specific programs.

The problem of unsafe abortion has been seriously exacerbated by contraceptive shortages caused by American policies hostile to birth control, as well as by the understandable diversion of scarce sexual health resources to fight HIV. All over the planet, conflicts between tradition and modernity are being fought on the terrain of women's bodies. Globalization is challenging traditional social arrangements. It is upsetting economic stability, bringing women into the workforce, and beaming images of Western individualism into the remotest villages while drawing more and more people into ever growing cities. All this spurs conservative backlash, as right-wingers promise anxious, disoriented people that the chaos an be contained if only the old sexual order is enforced. Yet the subjugation of women is just making things worse, creating all manner of demographic, economic, and public health problems.

I am not saying men are not victims of sexual violence, men are trafficked too, but women and girls are disproportionately affected. This is because of their already weak position in the society and family. The prevailing social norms, patriarchal structures, the power relations, the dichotomy between public and private space; if you look at all these, you will see they are the ones in worse positions. When you want to help, you start with helping the most oppressed. The idea and the ideal is that nobody should suffer any violence or human right violation, but then you have to start from the ones that are least protected or most vulnerable.

All people need to know how AIDS is transmitted, and every country has an obligation to educate its citizens. This is why every country must also improve literacy, especially for women and girls, so that they can make wise choices that will keep them healthy and safe.

Gender disparities still exist. Such disparities undermine not only women's capacity to participate in and benefit from development, but also the effectiveness of development as a whole. This is the reason for the president's insistence that illiteracy must be eliminated within a short period of time.

this is an ignorance that is damaging both to women and to men. Ignorance of the history of more than half the human species. And therefore the history of the entire species is distorted. In some ways we have come a long way; in other ways, I think, not at all. And then outside of the sphere of the kind of education where you would expect to find a certain liberal stance toward feminism, the issue becomes what women have any education available to them at all. Thinking on a global level, how early do women leave school, if they've gone to school at all? The illiteracy rate among women overall is rapidly on the increase. And so it's not just a question of, do we know our history, but do we know how to read, how to write? Do we know that there is such a thing as history, that we can be part of it, makers of it?