Interact Worldwide (Interact) has worked for over 30 years to promote sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), increasingly in relation to HIV/AIDS. Our approach is to work as an enabling partner providing technical, management and advocacy expertise and linkages, as well as funding, to organisations in the developing world. Our programmes reach millions of people annually in Africa, Asia and Latin America, many of them HIV+ or vulnerable to HIV infection, supporting them in accessing quality information and services, and helping them to understand their rights.

Specialising in sustainable partnerships, Interact places community need and Southern partners’ and governments’ priorities at the heart of our strategies to address the devastation of HIV/AIDS and poor SRHR, especially among the poor and marginalised. Our flexible and adaptable working practices respond to changing need, ensuring relevant and effective interventions, whether in a small community or on a national scale.

Interact’s HIV/AIDS programmes:

• support organisations run by, and for, people living with HIV/Aids to promote positive living, for example through: voluntary counselling and testing, peer support and information provision, and supporting equitable access to education, health care and anti-retroviral treatment
• work to reduce stigma, discrimination and denial
• provide home care for people who have become very ill
• provide specialist support for orphans and vulnerable children, including paediatric counselling and children’s clubs
• support health service delivery networks to mainstream appropriate HIV/Aids services, policies and practices.

Ensuring access to comprehensive information and services across the continuum of prevention, treatment, care and support, and broader SRHR, is paramount to tackling one of the world’s greatest threats to human health and economic development – the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

In 2004, some 39 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS. In Africa, women are three times more likely than men to be infected with HIV. Young women aged 15-24 are 2.5 times more likely to be infected; in some countries they are up to six times more susceptible.

The increased incidence among women and young girls reflects their greater vulnerability, due to both biological and social factors. Gender inequity can increase women’s risk of infection by limiting their access to information and resources, their mobility, and their ability to negotiate consensual sexual relations and condom use. In addition, poverty leads many women and girls into unsafe sexual relations, often with older partners.

Interact confronts inequality by working to ensure that young girls and women have the confidence, knowledge and means to protect themselves, and are empowered to negotiate consensual, safer sex.

For more information, please visit our website: www.interactworldwide.org