Civil society plays a vital role in the fight against HIV and AIDS, at the global, the regional, the country and grass roots levels, where it contributes to the policy development, development and implementation of programs and the delivery of essential services for people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS and advocacy. Civil society displays a broad spectrum of organizations and initiatives (NGOs, FBOs, CBOs and organizations of people living with
HIV/AIDS).

Notwithstanding the significant efforts and activities undertaken thus far, there was and still is a great potential to increase the effectiveness and impact of civil society.

The Free Space Process (FSP) aims to provide the space for engagement of civil society in the global HIV/AIDS response, because this has been fragmented, reactive rather than proactive, poorly coordinated and not aligned by a shared vision or a common agenda.

International Civil Society Support (ICSS) and seven international HIV/AIDS networking organisations have agreed on working together in the FSP partnership and join forces in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The seven networks are the Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (GNP+), the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW), the International Council of AIDS Service Organisations (ICASO), the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), the International HIV/AIDS Alliance & HDN (IHAA/HDN), the World AIDS Campaign (WAC) and the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EAA).

The ultimate goal of the FSP partnership is to support scaling up and a quality improvement of civil society’s response to HIV/AIDS. The Free Space Process contributes to achieving this goal through providing space for strategic thinking, creating added value by sharing each others expertise and infrastructures and addressing key capacity gaps on all levels - but particularly the country level - of the civil society architecture.

In a series of consultations, the partnership identified the following Activity Areas:

1: Organizing the HIV/AIDS Strategy Caucus
2: Facilitating the Civil Society Representatives Group
3: Strengthening the Civil Society architecture

Creating a better communications environment, supporting (young) leadership development and a shared effort in resource mobilization, are identified as cross cutting issues in all three activity areas.

Reports of the different meetings can be downloaded from this webpage.