A pre-conference symposium on reducing the stigma of AIDS took place on Saturday 12 August, looking at lessons from countries including Mexico, Tanzania and Vietnam. As part of the symposium, Alliance regional co-ordinator for stigma and discrimination Sue Clay and Alliance regional trainer Chipo Chiiya, took a skills building session on understanding and challenging HIV stigma in high prevalence countries, using a toolkit developed with the involvement of over 50 NGOs.
"We had a great mix of people," said Sue. "And we got everyone singing and dancing together before we started to break the ice. The session took the group of around 25 people through three activities from the stigma toolkit, including an exercise looking at and discussing pictures of stigma in action. We had new pictures of stigma in Senegal to use as well, and this was a great opportunity to test them out."
The group also spent some time discussing how HIV had affected their own lives. "We had quite a mix of people," said Sue. "While some had been very directly affected, and others less so, everyone agreed that even though we are all working on HIV, we don't take the chance often enough to talk about how we ourselves have been affected."
"Everyone acknowledged that stigma was still a problem where they lived and worked, and the symposium really brought out the personal experiences of the group. During the question and answer session at the end, people didn't want to stop! It is just sad that this couldn't have been part of the main conference programme so we could have reached more people."
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