Policy/Enabling Environment

The Republic of Uganda Ministry of Health has released its National Pediatric and Adolescent HIV Advocacy Strategy And Road Map 2022-2026, disseminated in Kampala during October 2022. 

The overall objective of this strategy is to complement and catalyze the ongoing national programs targeted at improving pediatric and adolescents HIV outcomes by addressing the policy and resource allocation gaps. This will be through putting in place a uniform and harmonized technical approach to advocacy across the national response stakeholders. The strategy provides standardized practical approaches to guide stakeholders in planning, designing, implementing and evaluating advocacy initiatives in support of pediatric and adolescents HIV. The strategy will institute systems to keep truck of ongoing and new advocacy initiatives to ensure they are aligned to the advocacy issues highlighted in the strategy for continuous process quality improvement and mitigate risks associated with uncoordinated advocacy initiatives. 

This document from UNAIDS provides guidance on how to leverage and intensify the integration of HIV with social protection and other programmes for ending poverty and inequality. It further summarizes relevant evidence on social protection and its contribution to the AIDS response.

Adolescents in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) are key to achieving the global goal of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. ESA is home to 1.74 million adolescents living with HIV (ALHIV), representing 60 per cent of this population globally. In 12 ESA countries, AIDS is the leading cause of adolescent mortality. While there is an increasing focus on adolescents, the pace of progress remains slow, especially when compared with the growing needs of ALHIV.

It is time to deliver programmes at scale to address the needs of ALHIV, accelerating evidence of interventions producing results or showing significant promise for scale. This document examines and consolidates the current experiences of ALHIV programming in the region to support further implementation and scale-up of evidence-driven models. The findings serve as a call to action and the key considerations as a guide for governments and funding and implementing partners in scaling up service delivery to ALHIV.

In partnership with the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNICEF has supported the governments of Botswana and Lesotho to implement targeted programmes for adolescent girls and young women. In Lesotho, a national multi-sectoral referral framework is strengthening community-facility linkages and is catalyzing increased access to HIV/SRH services by guiding adolescent and young people to appropriate services and care. In Botswana, a radio drama series together with peer education components is tackling tough issues adolescents are facing in love, life and relationships. Documentation of both experiences are available for download.

This multi-country case study from the UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office highlights important HIV-specific interventions that were integrated into the emergency cyclone response in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe during and after Cyclone Idai in March 2019. 

This brief summarizes lessons learned from Zimbabwe’s pilot implementation of integrated or multi-disease testing. Partnerships in the country focused on leveraging existing GeneXpert platforms for both TB and HIV testing to improve access to early infant HIV diagnosis and viral load testing. These findings describe the benefits of integrated testing for clients, health providers and the health system and are a resource for other countries scaling up point-of-care integrated testing.

This brief highlights the current scenario of policies and programmes related to point-of-care viral load testing among pregnant and breastfeeding women living with HIV. In many countries, viral load policies are not differentiated for pregnant and breastfeeding women despite evidence that point-of-care viral load testing is helpful for this population. Same-day results for pregnant and breastfeeding women can help ensure timely initiation of ART, improved rates of viral suppression and retention in care to support efforts of preventing vertical transmission of HIV.

At a high-level meeting in Dakar, Senegal in January 2019, UNAIDS, UNICEF and WHO urged countries in Western and Central Africa to strengthen their commitments towards EMTCT and universal coverage for paediatric testing and treatment for HIV.

Countries and partners renewed their commitment to the 2015 Dakar Call to Action for Accelerating the Elimination of New HIV Infections in Children and Access to Treatment for Children and Adolescents Living with HIV by 2020.

Urgent and ambitious 2020 global targets are on the horizon, yet there has been insufficient progress in paediatric and adolescent HIV to date. Scaling up HIV services for all children and adolescents is needed, in alignment with the UNAIDS super-fast-track framework. It’s time to make sure that nobody is left behind.

This series of 12 policy briefs by the Child Survival Working Group (CSWG) looks at scaling up key interventions for children and adolescents living with HIV. They present evidence, policy and monitoring considerations, implementation guidance and tools necessary to scale up 12 key interventions which have proven successful in identifying, linking and supporting children and adolescents to access and remain in quality care and treatment.

They are designed for program managers in government and civil society programs, particularly at country-level, and provide practical information and direction.

Learn more in the Foreword and download the briefs below. 

• Addressing the service delivery needs of children of key populations

• Strategies to improve retention of mother-baby pairs in PMTCT programs

• A child-centred approach for HIV programs

• Providing differentiated service delivery to children and adolescents

• Point-of-care testing as a solution for timely early infant diagnosis

• Complementary and connected: Engaging community and faith-based organizations to deliver PMTCT and pediatric HIV services

• Sensitizing health workers to providing responsive care for adolescents and young people living with HIV

• Family-based index case testing to identify children with HIV

• Meaningful engagement of adolescents and young people in national and local HIV programming

• Scaling up optimal antiretroviral treatment for children: A long overdue intervention

• Preventing and treating tuberculosis among children living with HIV

• Providing peer support for adolescents and young people living with HIV