Fifteen HIV positive women in Kyiv representing social workers and active leaders/volunteers in this community participated in the two-day training on improving advocacy skills for better accessing services. The training took place on 18-19 November within AFEW’s new project “Immediate Intervention to improve health of HIV positive women in Kyiv.” The project is funded by Gilead’s goSHAPE programme and is meant to empower HIV positive women to provide peer support to members of community.

In the course of the training participants became familiar with the methodology of ‘immediate intervention’, which is based on the principle of meaningful involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS. This methodology has been successfully implemented by the Positive Women of the World (PWW, Netherlands) and is a recognised good practice on health and migration in the EU.

Two visiting trainers from the Netherlands discussed with the group the issues of reproductive rights and sexuality, community involvement and activism, stigma and discrimination, family affairs and employment, substance abuse, treatment and recovery.

“The work on the ground is going great: they have already set up a 24/7 hotline for HIV positive women and soon computer and English language lessons will be provided for free for the most active women,” – said Sylvia de Rugama Prado from the PWW.

This is a pilot project in Ukraine, and it resulted from last year’s study tour of HIV positive women from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to the Netherlands to see how this work is carried out in practice. In Ukraine the project is implemented in partnership with the Kyiv City Branch of All-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS. In April 2015 a group of Ukrainian HIV positive women together with medical staff from the Kyiv city AIDS centre will visit the Netherlands for another study tour to exchange experiences and build partnership with the Academic Medical Centre (AMC) in Amsterdam.