2.2 A Failure of Leadership

Rethinking Development Podcast

Paula Donovan is the co-director of AIDS-Free World, an international organization that advocates for institutional change with a focus on reforming powerful institutions’ responses to the social injustices that have allowed HIV to flourish. She has spent more than three decades working to advance women's and children's rights, both within the UN system—with UNICEF, UNIFEM and the Office of the UN Special Envoy on HIV and AIDS in Africa—and as a civil society advocate since she co-founded AIDS-Free World. She launched AIDS-Free World’s Code Blue Campaign in 2015 to end impunity for sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel, beginning with the military and civilian personnel involved in UN peacekeeping operations. She speaks to us about working to promote mothers' right to have control over infant feeding choices, structural injustices, the fear and stereotypes associated with the HIV crisis in eastern and southern Africa, activist movements, the failure of UN leaders to name and shame bad politicians, violence against women, advocating for the creation of a UN agency devoted to women's issues, the UN System Wide Coherence Agenda, fighting to end impunity in cases of sexual abuse and violence by UN staff, the UN convention on privileges and immunities, and much more. She joins us from Boston, USA.

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