Multisectoral Dialogue: Multisectoral Cooperation, Advocacy and Community Empowerment

First, thank you for allowing me to join you this afternoon for this dialogue.

The role of civil society in Moldova, especially community-based organizations working as community health workers and community social workers, peers, and mentors are highly recognized globally for HIV achievements.

Civil Society Organisation staff have the unique ability to reach those requiring support in their communities to provide the services, counseling, and other support they require.

In Moldova, community-based organizations, many of you here have had a profound impact and contribution to HIV results: from prevention in key populations, to care and support for people living and affected by HIV. The impact of your work cannot be underestimated – your dedication and professionalism is recognized and appreciated. 

To answer the panel questions, I’ll start by highlighting that advocacy and oversight role of civil society organisations go well beyond service provision – coming from a civil society background I understand how difficult this can be at times.

Empowering communities and making policy change, can at times be a very difficult task.

Decision makers are faced with multiple competing demands and very often without the means to deliver on all required support – or a full understanding of the issues and the challenges.

Which means that it can be harder for you, as advocates and human rights defenders to advance your agendas as fast as you would like to. Advocacy takes times, trust, well developed relationships, and solid data based on community dialogue.

How you choose to dialogue and cooperate with your local public authorities is really important to move the HIV agenda forward. From my point of view, your advocacy has to be well integrated with human rights, gender equality, social and economic development, so that HIV is not brought as an isolated issue.

In an age of dis- and mis-information how we use and share data will also have a direct impact on how it is perceived and how it is used.

From the United Nations, we have worked hard to ensure that people living and affected by HIV are recognized in our cooperation agreement with government as a group of the population still left behind.

Firstly, because of the very high stigma and discrimination people are facing, but also we still have a long way to reach prevention and treatment targets.

I am proud of the fact that 9 UN agencies in Moldova have HIV reflected in their programming - addressing clinical aspects, prevention, human rights, gender equality and Gender Based Violence, support to key populations, legislation, and refugees.

We, as a UN family remain strongly committed to supporting people and communities affected by HIV – and are proud to work with and alongside the many civil society organisations active in this area.

Thank you all for the extremely important work you are all doing!