Hands up for #HIVprevention: Empowerment of young women and girls

It’s week 4 (Nov 7-13) in our countdown to World AIDS Day 2016 and the focus turns to the empowerment of young women and girls. Young women aged 15-24 years are at particularly high risk of HIV infection, accounting for 20% of new HIV infections among adults globally in 2015.  

This week, UNAIDS Executive Director, Michel Sidibé has recorded his own message of support for the campaign – you can see it below. Later this week, please keep a look out for special messages from United States Global AIDS Coordinator, Deborah Birx and from UNAIDS Global Advocate for Young Women and Adolescent Girls, Princess Tessy of Luxembourg.

During the week, you’ll find a series of features, videos, statistics, graphics and messages posted both on the special UNAIDS campaign page on unaids.org and on the 2016 World AIDS Day #HIVprevention page, accessible through the UNAIDS Facebook page.

Many thanks to everybody who has contributed messages until now and we encourage everybody to continue to share your photos and video messages about how we can strengthen HIV prevention efforts. So far, we have reached 513 006 people on Facebook and 16 097 people have engaged with content through likes, shares and comments. On Twitter, we've reached 1.2 millionpeople and our tweets have been retweeted 4800 times and liked 4000 times.

This is how you can participate.   

Submit:

A photograph of a word or phrase written on the palm of your summarizing why the empowerment of young women and girls is so important as a method of HIV prevention or what needs to be done to increase their availability.

and/or:

A short video message (maximum 30 seconds) explaining why the empowerment of young women and girls is so important as a method of HIV prevention and what needs to be done to increase their availability.

Your photos/video messages can be uploaded to the events page specially created for the 2016 World AIDS Day #HIVprevention campaign on the UNAIDS Facebook page. Here, you will also be able to post news about events that you are planning to hold for World AIDS Day. Please share your contributions on your own Facebook page too to help us get the message out.

Just to remind you, other supporting materials, such as posters and postcards, are available through the campaign page on unaids.org. Both posters and postcards are available in Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian for the empowerment of young women and girls week. Materials for upcoming weeks will also be made available in these seven languages.

You can find out more in the campaign brochure which you can find on the campaign page on unaids.org

We look forward to seeing your contributions on the empowerment of young women and girls and thank you in advance for your support.