By guest blogger, Brian Mwebaze

Brian is the young researcher who conducted a secondary analytic of the CrowdOutAIDS open forum data on what the crowd had to say about access to Sexual and Reproductive Health information and services. He is currently attending the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating board where he presented the findings as well as reports back to the @CrowdOutAIDS community. 

Yep, that’s correct! (English) Oui, C’est  exactt!(French) هذا هو الصحيح (Arabic) Eso es correcto!(Spanish) Det er korrekt! (Danish) Isso é correto ! (Portuguise) …Sorry for those whose languages don’t appear here! I am not trying to promote some stigma and discrimination against your languages lol. Much respects to you!

Now, as you are aware, the 30^th UNAIDS PCB meeting is now well underway (read in high definition) here in Geneva. You can read more about the board here http://www.unaids.org/en/aboutunaids/unaidsprogrammecoordinatingboard/

Day 1 of the 30^th UNAIDS PCB meeting opened up with a minute of remembrance of the souls lost to AIDS after which a representative ofPoland, the Chair of the PCB opened the meeting. Following the opening, the UNAIDS Director, Mr Sidibé did the magic of informing the participants about the work that UNAIDS has been involved in. In attendance were approximately 60 countries represented, 3 Special UN SG representatives, in addition to the UNAIDS co-sponsors..

At the day 1, UN-Women was officially endorsed as a member of the UNAIDS family and will henceforth support UNAIDS in advocating and planning women-focused programmes using a rights based approach. It was soooo awesome to hear the speech from the UN-Women representative, who clearly stated that:-‘…UN-Women cannot make a real impact when men are not supportive….’

Another beautiful point made by Mr Sidibé, who highlighted that he ‘…acknowledge the work of UNAIDS in supporting the #CrowdOutAIDS Youth Strategy which I had the opportunity to launch in Nigeria…the first in the history of the UN.”. I think we (youths who made this history) should raise our glasses…and yes, I am receiving a lot of comments under the twitter madness hash tag #youthpcb30 about the outcomes of the final report. Trust me, the @CrowdOutAIDS superstars are working on that.

What I really loved about the 1^st day of the 3-day meeting was the sheer commitment that all country representatives, regional representatives and representatives from NGOs showed in ensuring zero new HIV infections, Zero HIV discrimination, Zero mortalities by HIV related infections. They condemned countries whose stands are against human rights citing that they are ‘failing’ the war against HIV. All this inspires a young mind…Looking forward to tomorrow<<<our session