This year’s World AIDS Day arrives with an urgency we can no longer afford to soften. In January, EATG warned that funding cuts were already eroding the foundations of Europe’s HIV response—especially community-led services created by and for people living with HIV. Eleven months later, the political landscape has only hardened. I have watched the consequences unfold in real time. Communities are being pushed aside not by accident, but by political choices.
And make no mistake: the consequences of those choices are gendered.
Women—migrant women, trans women, women who use drugs, sex workers, and women experiencing and surviving violence—are among the first to feel the impact when budgets are slashed. The cuts rarely touch high-visibility biomedical programmes or the political speeches celebrating “progress.” They fall instead on the peer-run networks, the shelters, the community clinics, the harm reduction services—the very infrastructures that keep people alive. These losses are not collateral damage. They are the result of political decisions that devalue community work because it is often done by women, by queer leadership, by migrants, by people living in poverty.
In January, we stressed that communities are not an accessory to the HIV response. We are the HIV response. Yet across Europe, governments continue to divert resources away from human rights–based approaches and toward securitisation, border policies, and austerity—policies that fuel the very inequalities that drive HIV transmission and poor health outcomes.
We must name this clearly: funding cuts are a form of violence. They deepen stigma, expand inequity, and undermine every promise made about ending AIDS.
But communities refuse to be silent.
We choose to organise.
We choose to disrupt.
We choose to demand that decision-makers stop sidelining the voices of women, queer communities, trans communities, migrants, sex workers, and people who use drugs in favour of politically convenient narratives.
On World AIDS Day, and every other day of the year—and for every year until this epidemic is over—we call on policymakers, donors, and institutions to stop treating community services as optional. Recommit to human rights. Reinvest in gender transformative, community-led care. Restore the funding that austerity has stolen.
The cost of inaction is far higher than the cost of investment. When governments fail to act, the result is not savings—it is new infections, preventable deaths, collapsing services, and generations forced to live with the consequences of political negligence. The price is paid by the communities already pushed to the margins.
Ending AIDS is not a technical challenge. It is a political one—and political choices can change.
Nicoletta Policek
EATG, Executive Director
About the World AIDS Day 2025
Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response.
On 1 December WHO joins partners and communities to commemorate World AIDS Day 2025, under the theme “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response”, calling for sustained political leadership, international cooperation, and human-rights-centred approaches to end AIDS by 2030.
After decades of progress, the HIV response stands at a crossroads. Life-saving services are being disrupted, and many communities face heightened risks and vulnerabilities. Yet amid these challenges, hope endures in the determination, resilience, and innovation of communities who strive to end AIDS.
#WorldAIDSDay2025
#WAD2025
#StartsWithUsEndsWithUs
Get involved
Are you living with HIV/AIDS? Are you part of a community affected by HIV/AIDS and co-infections? Do you work or volunteer in the field? Are you motivated by our cause and interested to support our work?
Subscribe
Stay in the loop and get all the important EATG updates in your inbox with the EATG newsletter. The HIV & co-infections bulletin is your source of handpicked news from the field arriving regularly to your inbox.