Press Statement: International Sex Workers’ Day – Nothing About Us Without Us: Building Community-Owned Health and Economic Systems For Sex Worker Liberation

PRESS STATEMENT

INTERNATIONAL SEX WORKERS’ DAY  

Nothing About Us Without Us: Building Community-Owned Health and Economic Systems For Sex Worker Liberation

Building Community-Owned Health and Economic Systems for Sex Worker Liberation

Kampala, 02 June 2026,

Today, as we commemorate International Sex Workers’ Day, we honor the courage, resistance, and collective struggle of sex workers around the world who have fought against criminalization, violence, stigma, discrimination, and systemic exclusion. We pay tribute to generations of sex workers whose activism transformed silence into resistance and marginalization into movements for justice. As grassroots women sex workers in Uganda, the Alliance of Women Advocating for Change (AWAC) and her grassroots members stand united in declaring that our future cannot be built on survival alone. We refuse a future defined by dependency, charity, exclusion, and systems that continuously fail us.
We reject the notion that sex workers should remain trapped in cycles of poverty, violence, poor health, and economic insecurity while others make decisions about our lives without our participation.
For decades, sex workers have been denied access to dignified healthcare, excluded from economic opportunities, criminalized by harmful laws and policies, and subjected to violence in our homes, communities, workplaces, and institutions. We have experienced discrimination in health facilities, arbitrary arrests, extortion, forced evictions, violations of bodily autonomy, and exclusion from development processes that claim to serve us.
Yet despite these injustices, we have continued to organize, mobilize, care for one another as feminist sisters, and build community-led innovations and solutions.
Today June 02nd 2026, we are making a bold declaration: we are moving beyond survival and dependence towards community ownership, collective power, and self-determination. Through the Alliance of Women Advocating for Change (AWAC), grassroots sex workers are advancing a transformative vision to establish a Community-Owned Hospital that will provide holistic integrated, stigma-free, and rights-based healthcare services. This community hospital is not simply a building. It is a feminist act of resistance against systems that have denied us care, dignity, and humanity. It is a declaration that sex workers deserve access to quality healthcare designed with us, by us, and for us. The Community-Owned Hospital will serve as a center for comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, HIV prevention and treatment, mental health support, gender-based violence response, maternal health services, counseling, psychosocial support, and holistic wellbeing. It represents our commitment to building systems that prioritize care, healing, self-care, dignity, and justice.
At the same time, we are strengthening the Community Health and Livelihood Empowerment Group (CHLEG) SACCO nationwide as a feminist instrument of resistance and a transformative vehicle for economic justice, collective ownership, wealth creation, and financial liberation. We are reclaiming economic power and laying the foundation for the first sex worker led Microfinance Institution (MFI) in Uganda and across Africa, an institution built by us, owned by us, and accountable to our communities. This is more than financial inclusion; it is a pathway to collective wealth, self-determination, and economic freedom. We recognize that health justice cannot exist without economic justice. Poverty, unemployment, debt, education barrier, housing insecurity, and economic exclusion continue to undermine women’s ability to exercise bodily autonomy, access healthcare, and live with dignity.
The CHLEG SACCO is also our response to generations of economic marginalization. It is a community-owned financial institution that seeks to strengthen savings, access to affordable credit, entrepreneurship, investments, modern agriculture, livelihood opportunities, property/asset ownership, and long-term economic resilience for sex workers and our families.
As feminist sex worker leaders, we understand that economic dependence is often used as a tool of control. Financial freedom is therefore not merely an economic issue; it is a feminist issue. It is a human rights issue. It is a pathway to bodily autonomy, self-determination, and liberation. Our vision goes beyond service delivery. We are building institutions that shift power to communities most affected by inequality. We are challenging systems that treat sex workers as passive beneficiaries rather than leaders and change-makers. We are demonstrating that grassroots communities have the knowledge, expertise, and capacity to design sustainable innovations and solutions to the challenges sex workers face. On this International Sex Workers’ Day, we call upon the Government of Uganda, development partners, donors, financial institutions, civil society organizations, and allies to invest in community-led initiatives that are transforming lives and strengthening resilience. We call for increased investments in health, social protection, economic empowerment, and human rights for sex workers and other marginalized communities.
We further call for the removal of structural barriers that perpetuate violence, discrimination, stigma, and exclusion. We demand meaningful participation of sex workers in all decisions, policies, and programmes that affect our lives. Nothing about us should be decided without us. Today, we celebrate not only our resilience but our vision. We celebrate not only our survival but our leadership. We celebrate not only our struggle but our power to create alternatives.
We are not waiting to be rescued.
We are organizing.
We are investing.
We are building.
We are leading.
We are creating our own institutions.
We are reclaiming our future.
Because sex workers deserve more than survival.

We deserve health.
We deserve safety.
We deserve protection.
We deserve economic justice.
We deserve financial freedom.
We deserve dignity.
And we deserve the power to shape our own futures.
IN SOLIDARITY, IN RESISTANCE, AND IN POWER.

For Media Inquiries:
Alliance of Women Advocating for Change (AWAC) Uganda
Email: info@awacuganda.org
Telephone: +256-774-603-754
Website: www.awacuganda.org