More than 15 million women are living with HIV globally and every half minute another becomes infected. Widespread violence against women and girls is at the heart of these statistics.

With 5 million South Africans living with HIV, the risk of infection for these young women is extremely high. And once infected, HIV positive women are accused of bringing HIV into their homes and face violence, eviction and economic destitution as a result.

On World AIDS Day 2008, ActionAid decided to do something about this, with the launch of our Put your foot down campaign. We asked you to help us persuade the UK government to take action on violence against women - by contributing a shoe.

We wanted 2,876 people to take part in the campaign to represent the number of women who contract HIV each day. But we received over 3,200 actions!   

So what have we done with all these shoes?

Working with young artist Riitta Ikonen and YCN, we created a piece of art using the shoes you sent in. The finished product, an installation which uses customised shoes to tell the stories of women affected by violence and HIV and AIDS, was unveiled on International Women’s Day 2009 (8 March) at the Department for International Development. Ivan Lewis, the Minister in charge of HIV and AIDS, spoke at the unveiling.

Mr Lewis emphasised that DFID was strongly committed to doing more on violence against women, and promised that the UK would encourage other rich countries and the international community to do more on this issue. ActionAid will be following up both of these commitments.

The Minister also spoke with ActionAid partner Christiana Sutton Koroma, a women’s rights campaigner who recently worked with ActionAid to secure a series of important changes for women in Sierra Leone.  We are happy to hear that they met again when Mr Lewis travelled to Sierra Leone in April.

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