Stephen Lewis

The United Nations has a lot of capacity on the ground.

I was working for the Socialist International, after I left university in 1959, as a researcher.

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease.

I think when you've travelled around a lot in Africa, you understand something that many people here don't recognize: the extraordinary power that is Africa at village level - at community level.

It is always the village women who drive these things.

Young women, adolescent girls, are more subject to infection, sometimes at a rate of six times that of boys. That tells you a lot about the vulnerability of women.

Unless there is recognition that women are most vulnerable... and you do something about social and cultural equality for women, you're never going to defeat this pandemic.

I'm in a great rage now, as I understand how many lives we have lost.

But I don't want to leave until I see the breakthrough.

It gives one hope, this great strength of Africa.

I'm still at the end of my rope because I find myself not handling things well when I travel.

I learned later, just as a footnote, that the World Assembly of Youth was a CIA front.

Men haven't changed their behaviour, so women somehow have to be strengthened to be able to ward off the men.

One is that if women's sexuality in Africa wasn't under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren't subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behaviour generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn't have a pandemic.

All I know is that every time I go to Africa, I am shaken to my core.