AIDS Accountability Scorecard on Women Report

The AIDS Accountability Scorecard on Women is part of a series of reports from AIDS Accountability International (AAI), an organisation established to increase accountability and motivate bold leadership in response to the AIDS epidemic. The Scorecard on Women follows a series of other reports that began in 2008 with the AIDS Accountability Country Scorecard, a global rating of country responses to AIDS based on the United Nations 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS.

The Scorecard on Women is a tool complementary to the Country Scorecard. It provides a gender analysis of the government-provided data and assesses how well governments respond to the specific needs and vulnerabilities of women in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Six elements are assessed in the Scorecard on Women:

• Data Collection - the completeness of data reported by countries;
• Gender Mainstreaming - the degree to which countries have mainstreamed the gender dimension to AIDS in their HIV strategies and overall development planning and are implementing interventions aimed at improving gender equity with selected population groups, including men;
• Policy and Legal Environment - progress in the development and implementation of national HIV policies and laws aimed at ensuring that men and women have equal access to: prevention, treatment, care, and support; protection of their rights; and protection against discrimination;
• National Programmes - based on the five indicators using sex-disaggregated data: antiretroviral therapy (ART), the co-management of tuberculosis, and AIDS treatment; coverage of testing among adult and most-at-risk populations; and the coverage of prevention programmes among most-at-risk populations;
• Behaviour - what women know about HIV and how to prevent its transmission, and to what extent they have adopted behaviours that reduce their risk of infection; and
• Impact - designed to capture three critical measures of the effectiveness of the national response: a) the percentage of young people, aged 15-24, who are HIV-infected; b) the percentage of most-at risk populations who are HIV-infected; and c) the percentage of adults and children with HIV who are still on ART 12 months after initiating treatment.

By analysing the data in countries report, the report intends to "empower stakeholders at national, regional and global levels" with a tool to help identify gaps between what a government has committed to and what it is actually doing in order to advocate for an improved response. The 2009 report found that "as many of 83 (or 57%) of the 145 countries that submitted narrative reports failed to discuss gender at all," indicating the potential urgency of the report for advocates. Some countries opt out of reporting or do a poor job, which can be seen as a failure to live up to a central tenet of the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS transparency and accountability elements of political leadership.

Scores range from A or B (country is responsive to women’s needs), C or D (country is aware of women’s needs), to E (country is unfocused on women’s needs or did not report data on the issue).

The report provides an analysis of context and looks at needs and shortcomings that were revealed during the scorecard development. It ends with country-by-country data for a look at how nations fared with regards to the six elements.