Our work focuses on supporting local groups and communities to change their own lives and circumstances, to alleviate poverty and make significant social change. To achieve this, they must have their basic needs met, choices in their lives and an understanding of their rights. We help make this happen.
Swaziland currently faces the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence in the world and the lowest life expectancy of anywhere in the world. People have limited access to health care or knowledge of living with the disease. Women can be powerless to prevent infection of HIV/AIDS and support their families if widowed, and their situation is exacerbated by living in a patriarchal society.
Women are often blamed for the spread of the disease and lose their homes; children are left orphaned, without basic education and have to run households in the face of poverty and disease. Through funding primary school places for HIV/AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children, creating women-led income generation projects and through our legal work, Positive Women is empowering the women of Swaziland to secure a different, better future.
Positive Women is dedicated to empowering these communities.
Positive Women is the coming together of Swaziland Positive Living and The Children of Swaziland, two established and successful charities already in operation. The founders of these charities – Siphiwe Hlophe and Kathryn Llewellyn – saw huge potential to develop the work that both organisations undertake, so pioneered Positive Women as an innovative and forward-thinking project that reaches all eight of the Millennium Development Goals.
Positive Women’s mission is simple: to empower and educate communities affected by HIV / AIDs to create a greater understanding of the issues facing women and children and provide real, practical support that enables some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to change their circumstances.
History
Founders
In 1999, as a married 40-year-old looking to continue her education in agricultural economics, Siphiwe Hlophe discovered she was HIV positive. As a result, her husband left her and she lost an academic scholarship, but she reacted…
Staff
Stephen Brown
Stephen Brown is the Director of Positive Women. Stephen began working in International Development in 2004 as National Secretary of the National Union of Students UK. Since leaving NUS, Stephen has worked for both Global Ethics …
Trustees
Born in South Africa and having spent time in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Zambia, Laura has a keen interest in African development. She studied Marine Biology at Liverpool University and at the University of Bath…
Celebrity Supporters
Joseph Morgan is a British television and film actor popular on both sides on the Atlantic. His impressive CV charts his rise to international fame – Casualty, Doc Martin, Silent Witness, Hex, Mansfield Park, The Line of Beauty, and h…
Patron
Jack McConnell is the longest serving First Minister of Scotland. He served as First Minister from 2001 to 2007.
He was appointed to the House of Lords on 28 June 2010, as Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale….