What started as an outbreak in distant Wuhan, China, is now what the average Nigerian is very familiar with – the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) disease. It would be strange to meet anyone who has never heard about COVID-19. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease as a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, and since then, country leaders have striven to prevent the entry of the virus into their countries and/or its spread within their borders.

It was 1981 in Los Angeles, USA and five young previously healthy gay men had come down with a rare lung infection called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). At the same time in New York and California there were reports of a similar group of men succumbing to an unusually aggressive cancer named Kaposi’s Sarcoma.

In 1991, activists at the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute from the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) Rutgers University initiated the ‘16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence’ campaign.