SW » SWAN - SWAN News » March 8, 2011

SWAN - SWAN News

Global Fund Meeting in Sofia: Activists Demand More Funding for the CEE/CA

Posted: March 8th, 2011, 8:14am PST by Aliya

From December 13th to 15th, Sofia, Bulgaria was host to the 22nd meeting of the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM). Each year, the Global Fund holds a meeting away from its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, to offer delegates the opportunity to visit programs financed by the Global Fund. This was the first meeting held in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region.

One of the topics in the meeting was a discussion about reconsidering the eligibility of criteria for financing by the GFATM. Such a change would result in new funding opportunities for a number of countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. While the board deliberated on this issue, more than 600 activists from Serbia and Bulgaria chose the occasion to protest and to hand an open letter to the Executive Director in favor of such changes and to highlight the importance of increasing funding to the region in the world that currently has the most rapidly expanding HIV epidemic.
read more
Hungary: Celebrating a decade of work for sex workers' rights

Posted: March 8th, 2011, 8:02am PST by Aliya

Image:
The Association of Hungarian Sex Workers (SZEXE) celebrated its 10 year anniversary on the September 20th, 2010. The celebration included a short media sensitization and information session using SWAN materials and then speeches Ms. Ágnes Földi, chairwoman of the organization and Mr. Tamás Árva, the legal aid provider of the Association.

Ms. Földi thanked the partners and experts who have worked closely with the Association over the past 10 years for their assistance and expertise and talked about the history of the sex worker movement. According to Ms. Földi: "It has been an incredible achievement for our organization to get all levels of government to realize that sex workers need support. We hope that their willingness to help our cause will continue over the next 10 years and will lead to an improved legal framework for sex work.
read more
SWAN invited to train with the National Press Foundation

Posted: March 8th, 2011, 7:40am PST by Aliya

Image:
By Aliya Rakhmetova
July 16, Vienna, Austria - The International AIDS Conference (IAC) was preceded by a number of events to provide space for journalists, communities representatives, networks and researchers to make their participation in the IAC as meaningful as possible. In the framework of the IAC, SWAN was invited to hold a training with the National Press Foundation (http://www.nationalpress.org), whose primary mission is to increase journalists’ knowledge of complex issues in order to improve public knowledge.

A 90-minutes-long seminar on sex work issues was a part of a four-day journalist training which was organized by a USA-based non-profit journalist education organization National Press Foundation in collaboration with the International AIDS Foundation. This training involved 49 journalists from 40 countries. The aim of this training was to provide background information on issues around HIV/AIDS, human rights and their relevance to the rights of different groups of population.
read more
Lithuania: Coalition strengthens relationship with journalists

Posted: March 8th, 2011, 7:23am PST by Aliya

June, 2010 – Though it was Saturday, journalists met with SWAN representatives in Lithuania to talk about sex work. In hope to establish a closer and more productive relationship and to open a dialogue on the representation of sex workers in media, Coalition I Can Live invited journalists from various printed media for a discussion.

Gathered in one of the cozy cafes of the Old Town, the meeting organizers, Coalition I Can Live and DEMETRA, a drop-in center for sex workers, talked with journalists about types of sex work, regional and international sex workers’ rights movements, legal framework around sex work in Lithuania and main problems sex workers face in this country. In discussion of the possible stories for the news, the organizers used a list of articles that had been published over past years to show how actually narrow the covered topic had been.
read more