This new initiative will transform lives of sex workers: introducing SWAN’s Sustainable Health, Inclusion, and Futures for Transformation Programme (SHIFT)
The Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network (SWAN) is happy to share the news many have been waiting for: the SHIFT program has now officially launched!
SHIFT is a 3-year regional program that will give sex workers in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) legal and economic tools needed to fight for their human rights, access to health, security and safety. The programme is funded by the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF).
Background
Sex workers in the EECA region face particularly harsh conditions: an escalating human rights crisis, laws targeting the Civil Society, including anti-gender and foreign agent laws, and a high rate of HIV infections. AIDS-related deaths are on the rise, while the funding is shrinking, making HIV prevention and treatment even harder to access. The SHIFT Programme responds to these crises with solutions rooted in respect, human rights, and community care.
How it works:
SWAN will work in 5 countries: Ukraine, Lithuania, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, focusing on two thematic areas: legal and economic empowerment.
Legal Empowerment: Navigating and challenging hostile legal systems
Building the legal literacy of sex workers led organizations is key to reducing legal harms, strengthening access to justice, and ensuring safer, non-discriminatory access to health, including HIV services.
Sex workers and their organisations will receive the tools to:
- Understand, navigate, and influence the legal systems
- Develop a Decriminalization Roadmap
- Challenge punitive legislation
- Address the misuse of on non-sex-work-specific laws targeting sex workers and NGOs
- Engage policymakers through advocacy
Economic Empowerment: Creating financial independence
In the current shrinking funding, sex workers led organisations need to develop new income streams to sustain their vital work.
The center of the programme’s Economic Empowerment stream is a regional Social Enterprise Incubator that will offer guidance, training, risk-mitigation tools, and a monitoring and learning framework, alongside sub-grant to launch social enterprises in one country.
Sex workers and their organisations will receive the tools to:
- Design, launch, and strengthen community-owned, non-exploitative social enterprises that generate income
- Reduce reliance on short-term grants and donors
- Make income generating activities ethical, feminist, rights-based, and community-accountable
- Reinvest profits into HIV services, rights-based advocacy, and community support.
By supporting sex workers’ led entrepreneurship grounded in human rights and reinvestment in HIV services, SHIFT protects communities in hostile and underfunded environments.
Bigger picture, and plans for the future
Integrating legal literacy and economic empowerment in community leadership is essential for marginalized communities to sustain their movements and continuously fight for justice, safety, and inclusion.
Over three years, SHIFT aims to improve understanding of sex work models and the necessity of decriminalization, strengthen resistance against anti-NGO laws, reduce legal harassment of sex workers, and enable sex worker-led organizations to sustain HIV services through diversified funding.
But it doesn’t end there.
We hope SHIFT will pioneer models of legal and economic empowerment that can be replicated and expanded.
We hope to continue the SHIFT towards sustainable, rights-based, participatory solutions – until all sex work is recognized as work, and sex workers have the freedom and safety they deserve.