Adolescents

This progress report presents highlights of the first year of implementation (through December 2016) of the Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free initiative, which focuses on accelerating country-level progress toward ending new HIV infections among children, identifying children and adolescents living with HIV, ensuring their right to access life-saving treatment and quality care, and stopping the cycle of new infections among adolescents and young women. See the 2016 Framework to read more about the Three Frees. 

The paper quantifies the risk of early mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV among adolescents enrolled in nationally representative MTCT surveillance studies in South Africa. The authors found that adolescent mothers have three times lower PMTCT uptake and three times higher early MTCT compared to adults.

In follow-up to the 2017 Continental Summit in October 2017, Pediatric-Adolescent Treatment Africa (PATA) released a summary report with key highlights and recommendations from the meeting. Towards an AIDS Free Africa – Delivering on the frontline was the focus of the 2017 Summit, which brought together over 200 delegates across 15 sub-Saharan African countries along with programme implementers and policy-makers from across the globe. The recommendations provided are centred around three pillars – FIND, TREAT and CARE – that support the UNAIDS superfast-track framework. Attending health facility teams drafted new quality improvement plans and will be commencing 53 projects improving service delivery at the frontline in 2018.

UNICEF Learning Collaborative,Summary of Selected Research Articles
January - March 2018

Adolescents living with HIV have unique needs, and retention in care can be especially challenging for this population. Adolescent “teen clubs” can provide a source of social support that helps improve retention and adherence. HIV prevention among adolescents also remains challenging because there are multiple factors that can place adolescents at risk. Risk perception, especially among adolescent girls and young women (AGYW),remains low despite high levels of general knowledge about HIV. Further efforts are needed to support adolescents, especially AGYW, to understand and appreciate their own risk and to identify the most appropriate prevention strategies to protect themselves from acquiring HIV.

Towards an end to AIDS in children, adolescents and young women.

This case study is part of the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) ALL IN Initiative on Kenya's revision of tools/systems for disaggregation to strengthen adolescent strategic information.

This article is part of the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) ALL IN Blog Series on Rwanda's operational plan for adolescent HIV and sexual and reproductive health

This article is part of the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) ALL IN Blog Series on catalyzing adolescent participation around HIV in Mozambique. 

The current state of the AIDS response is not sufficient to end AIDS in children and adolescents.