Have you ever been part of an attempt to set a new record in the Guinness Book of World Records?  Want to help break an existing world record while also helping to increase access to HIV prevention tools?  If so, YOUR MESSAGE can be featured in what we hope will become the world’s longest chain of paper dolls. It will be on display as at the International AIDS Conference in Washington DC this July.

Universal Access to Female Condoms (UAFC) is working in partnership with CHANGE, Rewire and dozens of other organizations around the world to collect 30,000 individually completed Paper Dolls to display in one massive chain at the conference. This extraordinary visual statement will illustrate the broad-based, urgent demand for female condoms that exists all around the world. Right now, only 1% of all condoms used worldwide are female condoms (FC). Most people either don’t know about FCs or have never used them because they are poorly promoted, expensive and/or unavailable to them. Meanwhile, over half of all people living with HIV worldwide are women.  Female condoms are just as effective as male condoms in preventing HIV and pregnancy—and they allow women to protect themselves when male condoms aren’t being used. 

On Facebook, you can learn more about this project. To participate, just go to sign4femalecondons.org and put your own message on a paper doll.  UAFC will print your message out on a doll. Then your doll will be in the added to the chain, and help us to break the world record on July 27, 2012. Participation is free, it’s fast and you will contribute to a powerful visual statement to urge policy-makers and funders to invest more in making this under-utilized, highly effective HIV prevention tool accessible to all women and men who need them.