The Thai Network of People Living with HIV/Aids (TNP) won the Red Ribbon for providing access to care, treatment and support for people living with HIV/Aids.

The five winners were declared at the closing of the conference on Thursday night.

"Sometimes they work in extremely difficult situations, in contexts of war or extreme poverty, and yet they have found ways despite these obstacles to make things happen, to generate some real success on the ground," said Kemal Dervis, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator, in a press release from the award organiser.

The Red Ribbon Award is a new joint initiative of the Community and Leadership Programmes of the International AIDS Conference and is organised by UNDP in partnership with UNAIDS. It aims to support creative and sustainable ways to provide care, treatment and support to people living with HIV/Aids through the recognition of outstanding community leadership in addressing the epidemic.

The other four awards went to groups from the Ukraine (for addressing stigma and discrimination related to HIV/Aids), Zimbabwe (for addressing gender inequalities that fuel the HIV/Aids epidemic), Bangladesh (for promoting HIV/Aids prevention programmes) and Zambia (for providing support to children orphaned by Aids and other vulnerable children).

The winners of the five categories were selected by a committee of 50 international HIV and Aids experts from among nearly 600 communities around the world that were nominated.

"It [the award] is a great moral support for all Thais living with HIV and it is to urge the [Thai] government to be more aware in the role of people living with HIV in participating the national healthcare system management," said Kamol Uppakaew, co-founder and former chairperson of the TNP.

Established in 1997, TNP has striven to guarantee the right of HIV-positive people to equal access medical care as those who are not. Among its most significant achievements are getting anti-retroviral drugs included in the national health security system and strengthening the government's Comprehensive Continuum of Care Programme to be more aggressive in providing healthcare for people living with HIV. So far 184 hospitals around the country have allowed people living with HIV to be part of medical advisory teams to provide treatment guidelines for the hospitals and to give advice to people HIV-positive people on the ground that they have better understanding of the disease and infected people than doctors.

The network's latest success was the decision of GlaxoSmithKline to withdraw its patent applications for a key anti-retroviral drug in Thailand and India following sustained pressure on the global pharmaceutical giant.

The Red Ribbon is the first international award granted to TNP, which now has 924 local groups of people living with HIV under its umbrella.

Each winner of a Red Ribbon Award will receive a prize of US$20,000 (Bt750,000) which will be presented to them on World AIDS Day, December 1. The venue has not yet been fixed.

Wirat Purahong, chairperson of TNP, said some of the prize money would be used to register the organisation as a foundation, the rest on running its activities.