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Advocates & Technology
Advocacy has a role to play in all phases of technology development and introduction — from helping to structure the research agenda, to ensuring that community views and perspectives are included in the design of clinical trials, to creating political pressure for widespread and timely access to resulting products.
Advocates must maintain a sense of urgency and ensure that the sober realities of the HIV pandemic are not lost in discussions of strategy and policy. Even in areas with complex technical questions, it is frequently competition or political inertia that bog down progress. Advocates can monitor such deliberations and create pressure for action if the process fails to proceed expeditiously.
It is also the role of advocates to ensure that the views and perspectives of all those who stand to gain or lose from the process have a voice in important decisions. Traditionally, key interest groups --users, women's health advocates, HIV+ individuals, among others-- have largely been excluded from the drug development process. The global women's health movement, for example, has long protested the tendency of contraceptive developers to pursue new technologies with little or no input from the women's community or contraceptive users. In the 1990s, this began to change as women's health advocates and progressive forces in some research institutions began to explore ways of capturing and using input from women's advocates and users.
AIDS activists have also been very successful in making claims on the research community for greater involvement of non-scientists in the process of defining and implementing research agendas. In the context of microbicide development, this means working to ensure that all those who have a stake in the outcome are supported to engage effectively in the process of scientific research --including consumer groups, NGOs, and the communities that will host and enrol in clinical trials. It also means representing the public interest during licensing (see FDA page) negotiations and other agreements that can affect the price and accessibility of a microbicide.
