MS. PAULA DONOVAN, CO-DIRECTOR

Paula Donovan is Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, an international organization that advocates for institutional change. Its high-level advocacy, strategic communication, and creative legal approaches focus on reforming powerful institutions’ responses to the social injustices that have allowed HIV to flourish.  Ms. Donovan has spent more than three decades working to advance women's and children's rights, both within the UN system—with UNICEF, UNIFEM and the Office of the UN Special Envoy on HIV and AIDS in Africa—and as a civil society advocate since she co-founded AIDS-Free World in 2007.

Ms. Donovan was the first to call for a UN agency devoted to women. Her 2006 position paper, Gender Equality: Now or Never, set out the need and the rationale for the agency and spearheaded the global effort that led to the establishment of UN Women in 2011. Ms. Donovan launched AIDS-Free World’s Code Blue Campaign in 2015 to end impunity for sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel, beginning with the military and civilian personnel involved in UN peacekeeping operations.

An expert on advocacy communication, HIV, sexual violence, and women’s rights, Ms. Donovan is a frequent commentator for a broad range of national and international print, broadcast, and online media outlets around the world, including AFP, Al Jazeera, AP, BBC, BBC Afrique, CBC, CNN, Deutsche Welle, Devex, Estadão (Brazil), Foreign Policy, Fox News, The Guardian, The Intercept, IRIN, Mail & Guardian, Le Monde, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Newsweek, PRI, Radio Canada International, RFI, Reuters, Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden), SVT (Sweden), La Vanguardia (Spain), VICE, and The Washington Post, among others. She holds a Master’s degree in Corporate and Political Communication.