Key affected populations

This toolkit — prepared by members of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Nigeria and Atlanta, the University of Nigeria, the Healthy Sunrise Foundation, and the National AIDS and STI Control Program of Nigeria — provides implementers with the background, procedures, and resources/tools to support the implementation of Baby Showers in Congregational Settings. In PEPFAR programmes, countries are moving toward elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (EMTCT). One gap in achieving EMTCT is reaching women and their infants who do not come to the facility for care. The Baby Showers approach in Nigeria is one way of reaching women and their families in the community through faith-based congregations, with a strong evidence base to support its positive impact.

Baby Showers are celebratory gatherings for pregnant women and their partners with routine celebrations marked by prayers for the safe delivery of babies and to support parents-to-be as they prepare for their new arrival. Health screening, including HIV testing for pregnant women and their partners, is offered during the celebration that brings women, their partners, and their newborns together in a congregation. Other countries have expressed interest in learning from Nigeria’s experience. This resource has been adapted for implementation in additional settings and contexts and includes six accompanying tools in the appendix to aid in data collection and documentation.

This document highlights opportunities for both public and private sectors to engage in the global HIV response for infants, children, and adolescents in partnership with UNICEF. Below is also a spotlight on the Global HIV and AIDS Thematic Fund, with financial results from 2023 programming.

UNICEF is a key partner and leader in the AIDS response for children, adolescents, and women. It collaborates with governments and partners worldwide, offering innovation, technical expertise, data and evidence, programme excellence, coordination, and convening power.

UNICEF is 100 per cent voluntarily funded, and is seeking support to deliver ambitious HIV results for children and to ensure the world can reach Sustainable Development Goal Target 3.3, to end the epidemic of HIV by 2030. 

Global initiatives are urging countries to prioritize quality as a way of reinforcing human rights-based approaches to health. Yet evidence from both high- and low-income countries shows that services for adolescents are highly fragmented, poorly coordinated and uneven in quality. Pockets of excellent practice exist, but, overall, services need significant improvement and should be brought into conformity with existing guidelines.

The WHO/UNAIDS global standards for quality health-care services for adolescents aim to assist policy-makers and health service planners to improve the quality of health-care services, so that adolescents find it easier to obtain the health services that they need to promote, protect, and improve their health and well-being, according to their needs. 

This publication presents global standards for quality health-care services for adolescents, as well as an implementation guide and monitoring tools.

The AU Summit Brochure was created after the inaugural countries leading the Global Alliance to end AIDS in Children met together with community representatives, UN agencies, stakeholders and partners gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on February 1st, 2023. This was done to discuss our progress and our plans to end AIDS in Children by 2030 and this brochure highlights each AU country's Global Alliance action plan.

The International Treatment Preparedness Coalition developed the Key Population Activist Toolkit on PrEP, to equip community activists with the knowledge and skills they need to demand pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

Community-led demand efforts can influence the success of PrEP programming, including influencing how accessible PrEP services are to the community, whether people actually choose to take PrEP, and whether these services are being offered in a way that is suited to the needs of PrEP users.

The Toolkit aims to:

• Equip community activists with the knowledge and skills that they need around PrEP, advocacy, and community mobilization so that they are able to mobilize their communities to demand PrEP
• To enable community PrEP activists to advocate with their governments and service providers to allow key populations access to PrEP services
• To ensure that these services are provided in a manner that is affordable, appropriate to their needs, and addresses access barriers.

The toolkit is intended for individuals, organizations and networks – particularly those representing key populations – wanting to:

• Learn more about PrEP
• Contribute to preventing the spread of HIV in their communities
• Gain the knowledge and skills that they need to mobilize their communities and advocate with community leaders and decision makers for access to PrEP

Motherhood is common among female sex workers (FSWs) and many have at least one biological child. People who inject drugs (PWID), men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people (TG) are also part of families and have at-risk spouses and children in their households. Stigma and discrimination towards key populations (KP) can negatively impact their children’s access to health, education and protection services. Program data from Cameroon, Ethiopia and Tanzania reflect positivity rates of 4-6 per cent when children of FSWs are tested for HIV.  Access to early infant diagnosis (EID), HIV testing and treatment and other critical health, social and economic strengthening interventions for children of KP and their families must be improved as a priority.

This is part of a series of 12 policy briefs by the Child Survival Working Group on scaling up key interventions for children and adolescents living with HIV. Learn more. 

PATA and PACF have worked across 9 countries and strengthened 36 community-clinic collaborations through their partnership on the three-year C3 programme on collaboration between Clinics and Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) to deliver services together for improved PMTCT-paediatric case finding and HIV treatment.

Together, PATA and PACF have identified how clinical-CBOs collaboration at a local level can be in transforming health responses. They developed a Clinic-Community Collaboration Toolkit and accompanying Be Connected e-learning course informed by the C3 programme’s successes and lessons learnt.

Through these new tools, they hope to continue empowering health providers as well as encouraging community-based staff and local coordinators to initiate, expand and improve upon joint activities and action plans, in a collaborative effort to strengthen their work on paediatric and adolescent HIV.