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History
Building a Movement...
The Global Campaign was officially launched in July 1998 at the XII International AIDS Conference in Geneva. The idea of the Global Campaign came from key members of the women's health and HIV community who decided to work together to focus world attention on the critical need for new HIV prevention options, especially for women. With start up funding from UNAIDS, they founded the Global Campaign for Microbicides, a broad-based international effort designed to generate political pressure for increased investment in microbicides--products that women and men could use vaginally or rectally to protect themselves and their partners from HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
The goal of developing a safe effective microbicide depends on more than just good science. It requires political will and willingness on the part of the public and/or the private sector to invest the necessary resources.
Unfortunately, political will cannot easily be purchased based on the logic of public health necessity. It must be cultivated and then translated into concrete, strategic action.
This is why public education and advocacy are critical to task of bringing public health goods --such as vaccines and microbicides-- to market. Unlike other areas of science, where the motives of profit and personal ambition are sufficient to propel innovation, microbicides will only become a reality if we "make visible" and then mobilise the latent demand for alternatives to the male condom.
The Global Campaign spreads its wings
In its first two years, the Global Campaign developed Action Kits for grassroots activists; raised awareness about microbicides via the media, workshops, and outreach to policymakers; and launched a major legislative strategy to increase US government investment in microbicide research and development. During this era, the Global Campaign was managed out of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), a small woman's health NGO based in Takoma Park, Maryland. By 2001, the Campaign had grown into a major global organising effort, with more than 70 partner groups worldwide.
As it grew, the demands of the Campaign began to exceed the organisational capacity of its original home, so in January 2001, the Steering Committee of the Campaign decided to hire a full-time Executive Director and move its secretariat to a larger organisation. At this time, Lori Heise, a long-time women's health advocate, decided to step down as Co-Director of CHANGE, and assume full-time leadership of the Global Campaign.
In April 2001, the Campaign moved its secretariat --including its staff and leadership-- to the DC offices of the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), a sister-organisation, headquartered in Seattle, Washington. PATH's mission --to find innovative solutions to public health problems, especially those affecting the health of women and children-- is entirely consistent the goals and objectives of the Campaign. Moreover, PATH's president, Dr. Christopher Elias, is a leading expert of the issue of microbicides and has a long history of collaboration with women's groups to engage advocates in the process of technology development.
WHAM and the movement's early years
It is no exaggeration to say that today's interest and investment in microbicides is largely due to the concerted action of advocates working over the last decade to draw attention to the need for new HIV prevention tools to supplement the male condom. Individual and organisational champions have helped create and nurture the field of microbicide research and development, starting as early as 1987. Early leaders came from the field of women's health and contraceptive research and development, and have been joined in recent years by advocates working on HIV/AIDS, STIs, and infectious diseases (see timeline).
Into this gap have evolved several microbicide-specific initiatives aimed at encouraging a broader coalition of groups to engage in microbicide advocacy. The first such effort was known as WHAM, Women's Health Advocates on Microbicides, a group of eleven women's health organisations and networks worldwide that banded together in 1993 to work in partnership with the Population Council to influence the future course of the Population Council's nascent microbicide research effort. This group met semi-annually for several years to help shape the Council's microbicide program, including helping to design a multi-country study of women's formulation preferences, reviewing draft protocols, exploring ways to better monitor informed consent in clinical trials, and providing recommendations to Council management. WHAM's work culminated in 1997 with the convening of Practical and Ethical Dilemmas in the Clinical Testing of Microbicides, an international symposium that brought together 55 participants from 15 countries to build consensus on how best to conduct microbicide trials.
As the field matured, however, it became clear that it was no longer sufficient to focus advocacy attention exclusively on one actor. New microbicide actors had entered the arena and the locus of activity was shifting from the lab to the field, as different microbicide candidates began to enter clinical trials. So in 1997, WHAM formally disbanded in order to allow a more inclusive, broader-focused advocacy movement to evolve.
By 1998, activist energy around woman-controlled prevention had coalesced under the new banner of the Global Campaign for Microbicides.
