COLOMBO 1 December: Sri Lanka’s national ‘Roadmap to End AIDS by 2025’ was launched amidst large crowds at the Campbell Park, Colombo on 1^st December 2016 commemorating the World AIDS Day after an awareness walk participated by thousands of people.

UNFPA Sri Lanka staff supported the walk by carrying trilingual banners displaying the slogan ‘Zero discrimination, zero infections, zero deaths; 2025 AIDS-free country’. The walk commenced at the Ministry of Health and ended at the Campbell Park, two kilometers away.

Aung Htwe, 41, had to flee his home in Nam San Yam village in northern Myanmar when fighting between armed forces reached his village. For the last five years, he’s lived in a camp for displaced people, unable to return as the conflict rages on.

“Because the shelters are so small and the walls are so thin, there is no privacy, and I slowly became aware just how much violence there is within families.”

“Some women are very upset and are not able to immediately explain what has happened. I have to help them relax and become calm before they can talk.”

Daw Lu Bu is a caseworker at a UNFPA-supported Women and Girls Centre in Myanmar’s conflict-ridden Kachin State. The Women and Girls Centres respond to and help prevent gender-based violence (GBV) in camps for internally displaced persons.

It is past time to get serious about HIV prevention. We cannot hope to end the AIDS epidemic when every day almost 6,000 people are infected with HIV. Progress on prevention has stagnated. Since 2010, the annual number of new infections among adults has remained unchanged. Antiretroviral treatment has reached more than 18 million people in 2016 and has saved millions of lives and reduced the risk of new infections. But treatment alone cannot stop the spread of HIV.

Ma San San Aye, a woman in her forties with short hair, picked up the ringing mobile phone and spoke for a few minutes. “Sorry, it’s one of my peers,” she apologized with a smile, and continued the conversation. It was about her life, full of harsh struggles. She said she had had faced difficult and trying times as a sex worker before landing at her current job as a peer educator. “In those days, life was harsh. I was arrested and got a two year sentence in 2005. It was like hell. Other inmates looked down on us, just because we were sex workers. We were marginalized.