A Message from AIDS-Free World

After 19 years of advocacy, partnership, and action, AIDS-Free World has closed its operations.

Since 2007, AIDS-Free World has worked alongside activists, community leaders, survivors, and advocates around the world to confront injustice, amplify unheard voices, and advance accountability in the response to HIV and other human rights challenges.

As a project of the Tides Center in the US and MakeWay in Canada, we have been privileged to support efforts that challenged stigma, exposed abuses, and promoted the dignity and rights of people whose experiences too often went unheard.

This decision was not made lightly. The current political and funding environment has made it impossible to sustain the personnel and resources necessary to continue our work.

Over nearly two decades, we were proud and honored to contribute to the advancement of social justice by applying our legal expertise and communications skills in pursuit of meaningful change. Working alongside AIDS and women’s rights activists and supporters, we threw ourselves into “speaking up and speaking out” to advance more urgent and effective global responses to HIV and to promote human rights, gender equality, accountability, and public health.

Countless allies, partners, and donors shared our accomplishments, which we’re pleased to say are too numerous to list. An illustrative sampling includes being the first to call for a dedicated United Nations agency for women, a goal we pursued until the establishment of UN Women in 2011. Early on, we initiated a legal case seeking recognition of a brutal campaign of politically motivated mass rape as a crime against humanity, a case that remains before the courts today. We successfully challenged laws criminalizing homosexuality in Jamaica and the travel ban that prohibited LGBTQ+ people from entering Trinidad and Tobago. Our Legal Consultation Centers set up at international AIDS conferences provided free, one-on-one sessions assisted hundreds of attendees with their HIV-related legal questions. It was our privilege to work alongside disability advocates to secure greater accessibility and accommodations at those biannual international AIDS conferences. And it was an honor to partner with health professionals and organizations of women living with HIV to end the dangerous use of single-dose nevirapine to prevent transmission of the virus to newborns. We were proud to support the positive work of the UN and committed to demanding improvements when it fell short. Our legal skills were put to good use in aid to victims of a bogus "AIDS cure" promoted by former Gambian dictator Jammeh.

Friends and allies will recall a much more extensive list of accomplishments. But among our proudest achievements was the creation in 2025 of the Code Blue Campaign to end impunity for sexual exploitation and abuse committed by United Nations peacekeepers and other personnel. It brought global pressure to bear on the United Nations to confront its institutional failures and institute accountability. We are equally proud of developing Cavia, an innovative mobile phone platform designed to enable people in even the most remote and marginalized communities—including people who have never been taught to read or write—to conduct private, audio-only self-interviews in any language, without reliance on literacy, familiarity with technology, or access to electricity or internet service. Both initiatives reflect the principle that guided all of our work: lasting progress depends on listening to those whose voices are too often overlooked, and on challenging injustice wherever it is found.

We are profoundly grateful to all the professionals who contributed their time and talents as AIDS-Free World staff and consultants throughout the decades. And we are deeply appreciative of the generous donors, advisors, and supporters whose commitment made this work possible. Most importantly, we thank the communities and individuals whose determination inspired everything we did.

Although our organization has come to an end, the values that guided our work endure. The pursuit of justice, accountability, equality, and human dignity remains as vital as ever.

If you would like information about the work of AIDS-Free World or its Code Blue Campaign, including publications, campaigns, videos, or organizational records, we invite you to send an email to info@aidsfreeworld.org, and we will do our very best to assist.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

The AIDS-Free World Team