🗣️ A Call to the Global Fund Board to defend Gender Equality, Communities, Human Rights, and the Future of Health
As the Global Fund convenes for its 53rd Board Meeting, Women4GlobalFund (W4GF) brings an urgent and unified voice to the table: the time to protect and expand gender equality, human rights, and community leadership is now. ⏳
In the lead-up to the 8th Replenishment, W4GF’s position paper is a call to reclaim what lifesaving means—from the lived experiences of women and girls in all their diversity. This moment requires courageous political choices and a refusal to accept the dilution of rights-based, community-led, and gender-transformative work.
⚠️ What We’re Seeing: A Dangerous Shift
Across the globe, we are witnessing a backlash against gender equality and human rights. Donor priorities are narrowing, and health investments are shrinking into the false comfort of biomedical interventions alone. There is growing pressure to treat without rights, silence communities, and scale back critical gender-transformative work.
The Global Fund itself—long a champion of rights and community engagement—is at risk of moving away from its core mission. Under the current reprioritisation measures in GC7 and in the upcoming GC8 planning, gender and community components are being sidelined. This isn’t just a policy issue—it’s a political one.
What Lifesaving Really Means âś…
Lifesaving, to us, is not just clinical—it’s political. It means resourcing feminist movements. It means keeping open the safe spaces where transgender women and girls can access healthcare without fear. It means funding legal accompaniment, mental health support, and community-led monitoring systems that hold governments accountable.
If we fund only diagnostics and treatment, we fail. If we ignore power and patriarchy, we fail. Lifesaving means recognising that women-led and community-led groups are often the first to respond—and the first to lose funding when budgets shrink.
📢 What We’re Calling For
At this critical Board Meeting, W4GF urges the Global Fund to:
- Protect current gender-transformative funding in GC7 and GC8 and resist simplification measures that sacrifice rights and community voices.
- Embed gender equality with measurable indicators and accountability mechanisms—not in name only.
- Fund meaningful participation of women and girls in all of our diversity—including seats at decision-making tables, not just consultations.
- Uphold and expand investments in women-led, community-led responses to HIV, TB and malaria. These are not optional—they are lifesaving.
- Demand national governments match their commitments to gender equality with real investment, legal reform, and sustained political will.
The Global Fund must remain more than just a funder. It is a promise to leave no one behind. That promise must not be broken.
Join us in holding the line.
#FundHerHealth #8thReplenishment #MeaningfulParticipation #GenderJustice
📥 Read and share our full position paper here →