Felicita Hikuam is the Deputy Director of the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA) where she provides technical and managerial guidance to ensure cohesion between ARASA’s goals and objectives and its programme design, implementation and evaluation. She is a human rights activist with a keen interest in addressing structural and other challenges that prevent women and girls from realising their rights. Felicita has worked at national and regional levels in sub-Saharan Africa and at the international level in public health policy and human rights advocacy for the past 15 years.
She started her work in health and rights at the Namibia Red Cross Society in March 2002, where she managed Desert Soul, a health and development communication project. She joined the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, at the Secretariat in Geneva in 2003 to co-ordinate a global campaign on stigma and discrimination entitled ‘The Truth About AIDS. Pass it On…’ as part of the UNAIDS Collaborating Centre for Stigma Reduction (together with the Global Network of People living with HIV/AIDS).
In 2007, in the position of Global Programmes Manager for the World AIDS Campaign, she facilitated the successful set-up of the Africa Regional Programme to support advocacy campaigners in the global South and spear-headed the implementation of an advocacy campaigning programme in three African countries and the sub-regions of east, west and southern Africa. She joined ARASA as Programmes Manager in 2008 and was promoted to Deputy Director in 2012. For two years, from 2010 to 2011, Felicita served as the African NGO delegate on the NGO delegation to the UNAIDS Coordinating Board. She currently serves on the board of SRHR Africa Trust.
