My thoughts on...

A Eulogy to my mother, Virginia Gorna, given at her funeral on Thursday 18 February 2021 Virginia Gorna, 20 January 1942 – 3 February 2021 When my sons, Jovin & Arun, were babies I used to sing them a lullaby, and this was the refrain: “You can be anybody you want to be, You can […]

#Long Covid: Time for Action, published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 29 October 2020 Blog post written with Dr Will Nutland, Clare Shakya Every day our phones ping with the same message: “Testing alone can’t get us through the second wave.” Dutifully, we log in to the ZOE Covid-19 Symptom Study app, […]

You’re on Mute! ed. Dr Alex Connock Awkwardly, the first time I forgot the mute button was on a call with thirty public health and human rights experts, from five continents. It was mid-May 2020 and we were exchanging tips on how to make sure that gender equity and human rights are at the heart […]

Living with Lingering Covid-19 is an unpredictable roller coaster of a ride, Published in the Daily Maverick, 18 June 2020 It is striking how many of us living with Covid-19 are desperate for more research into this new and scary virus. The simplistic binary messaging – ‘nasty bout of flu’, or fatal disease in the elderly’ […]

Larry Kramer, 25 June 1935 – 27 May 2020, Obituary – Published in the Daily Maverick, 28 May 2020 Larry Kramer changed my life. Kramer, who died on 27 May 2020 in New York City, aged 84, was known for the sheer force of his anger and rage. His writing and AIDS activism inspired generations of […]

Living with Covid-19 infection is weird as hell, Published in the Daily Maverick, 19 May 2020 I suspect I’m the original Covid-19 bore.  I’m the one you’d sneak away from at a cocktail party – if we still had those. My family has had enough of my excessive lectures, demonstrations of correct hand washing, disinfecting surfaces […]

Boris and the Great British Bungle, Published in the Daily Maverick, 14 May 2020 On Wednesday, the UK was meant to be coming out of lockdown. Maybe. Or maybe not. No one was really quite sure. Almost as many people in the UK have watched an 18-second video by Matt Lucas, star of TV’s Little Britain, […]

Covid-19: A hard truth – poverty kills Published in Daily Maverick, 6 May 2020 The latest UK statistics on Covid-19 show the unrelenting climb in deaths – and with every weekly update we hear a more complex story. We now have over 10% of the global caseload: 29,427 recorded by 5 May (possibly well over 30,000 by the […]

Published in Daily Maverick, 28 April 2020 On 25 April 2020, the UK government announced that the steeply climbing Covid-19 death toll had surpassed 20,000. The figure is shocking. Last month, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said keeping the UK’s final Covid-19 death toll below 20,000 would be ‘a good outcome’. However, […]

Safer sex in the time of Covid; the urgent need to keep vital services funded Published in Maverick Citizen, 14 April 2020 Michael Callen was my earliest activist crush. I loved his skilful combination of rage, scientific smarts and creativity. The lyrics to his Aids anthems have been bouncing around in my head ever since I flicked […]

AIDS Lessons for Covid-19 Published in Daily Maverick, 9 April 2020 A 55-year-old man is not very well. It’s dominating the British media. We’re being fed a mix of infomercials disguised as stories (trying to enforce poorly presented health promotion messages) and barely disguised panic about what happens if (don’t say it out loud) a […]

Covid-19 puts Britain’s NHS in intensive care Published in Maverick Citizen, 7 April 2020 It feels indecent to be pointing fingers, when – as I write – Boris Johnson, the architect of the UK’s national response to Covid-19, is being wheeled into an intensive care ward in one of the best NHS hospitals in London. […]

Sarah’s story Redux – sadly. 28/01/2020 I spent Mothers Day 2011 in Hammanskraal – a poor informal settlement about an hour’s drive from Pretoria, South Africa’s capital city. My friend Anna & I were visiting a family we love dearly; my second family. We took bags of fried chicken, mealies, fizzy pop and lots of […]

An interview about feminist leadership, building movements and applying a gender lens to the HIV space. Join the conversations at the Conference: 5 March 2020, London UK Q: Women in Dev will bring together women at every stage of their career. What is the piece of advice that you most often give? And what was […]

Published in Maverick Citizen, 3 December 2019 I chaired this vibrant discussion between Farhana Yamin & Mark Heywood at the expert gathering of movement leaders and movement lawyers, Power of Law, Power of People, in Bellagio in September. The lively and energetic discussions inform my new book, and help to build learning across the movements: […]

How to Build a SRHR Movement Published in Devex, 11 July 2019 A couple of months after I left SheDecides I sat back to reflect on the great things we learned & my proudest moments Today is World Population Day, and 25 years after the revolutionary International Conference on Population and Development took place in Cairo, […]

Each year, 200 million women have an unmet need for modern contraception, more than 45 million women receive inadequate or no antenatal care, 1 million women and girls acquire HIV, and 25 million abortions are unsafe. These numbers illustrate huge gaps in access to basic sexual and reproductive health services, posing serious challenges to achieving […]

January 2016 marked the beginning of a new era for health and development. It was the start of Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and its accompanying sustainable development goals (SDGs).1 All governments have committed to this ambitious sustainable agenda and its goals. The Global strategy for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health (2016–2030)2 and its operational framework […]