Alice Welbourn

Founding Director, Salamander Trust

Alice is the Founding Director of Salamander Trust. Alice has worked on international gender and health issues for over 25 years. After completing a PhD at Cambridge University, she lived and worked in rural areas of East, Southern and West Africa for several years, as an international development consultant. Diagnosed HIV positive in 1992, she wrote a training package on gender, HIV, communication and relationship skills called “Stepping Stones” (www.steppingstonesfeedback.org), now widely used across Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and beyond.
Alice is a former international chair of the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (www.icw.org); a former member of the Leadership Council of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS;  and a former member of the UK Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Network steering committee. She is currently a member of the UNESCO Global Advisory Group for sex, relationships and HIV education; and is also co-founder and current chair of the SOPHIA Forum: the UK Chapter of this Global Coalition. (www.sophiaforum.net). Alice was one of 14 women to be honoured by the WorldYWCA in July 2007 with an award for innovative leadership in the global response to HIV. She has recently received the honour of being elected as Alumnus of the Year for 2012 by Clare College, Cambridge University. Alice also holds an Honorary University Fellowship at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in England, where she is an occasional tutor in medical humanities to undergraduate medical students.

In HIV Prevention, Protect the Mothers: A Message to the World Health Assembly 2012

It is critical that the barriers facing women in relation to accessing supportive peri-natal services are fully understood and addressed including structural drivers such as poverty, gender-based violence from partners, in-laws and neighbours, and property and inheritance rights loss. If we do not address these issues, we can not "save the babies."