People before profits. We must interrogate and challenge the capitalist framework that drives our healthcare systems towards privatisation, profit and corporate control. We must also challenge the monopoly of pharmaceutical companies that control the intellectual property of life saving medicines. Our health and our lives depend on access to free and non-privatised health services and drugs.

In the same way, we must interrogate funding of our health services, such as the conditionalities of aid, our States’ dependency on foreign aid to provide health services as well as the important void filled by NGOs and CSOs in the provision of those services.

Access to food, work, land, water, education and shelter for the poor, the marginalised and key populations are also social determinants that define our health. Our health depends on our capacity to fulfil our basic human needs.

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Our Demands:

To governments:

• Address the pervasive economic exclusion and exploitation of women, youth and adolescents that exacerbate their vulnerability to HIV and hinders their access to social services
• Stand firm against Intellectual Property and Trans-National Corporations to ensure free medicines and essential services for all
• Ensure easy, affordable and sustained availability of quality generic ARV and other essential drugs
• Properly resource and implement free public comprehensive health care services,
• Ensure adequate allocation of funding, particularly national and global funding, as well as other resources to key populations and marginalised community led initiatives
• Ensure proper regulation of private health care services and ensure that private corporations do not encroach on or undermine the delivery of public healthcare services
• Oppose policies dictated by multilateral financial and trade institutions that disregard or undermine people’s rights to health and healthcare.
• Address inequality and the availability of services particularly in under-resourced and rural areas
• Ensure the delivery of available, accessible, acceptable, quality health care for all
• Introduce a universal basic income grant, access to free education, land and clean water for all
• Hold the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO accountable for social disasters caused by anti-poor macroeconomic policies

To corporations:

• Make available affordable diagnostic and prognostic tests
• Ensure the availability of affordable ARV and essential medicines

To the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO

• Cancel the debts of all poor countries, especially those identified as vulnerable to HIV and AIDS
• Finance HIV and AIDS interventions with grants instead of loans
• Nullify pharmaceutical patents that adversely affect the availability of generic drugs