Global Fund

A summary of the commitments and targets within the United Nations General Assembly’s 2021 Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS

This implementation brief examines the current efforts in eastern and southern Africa to accelerate and scale up evidence-based PrEP delivery platforms for adolescent girls and young women. The brief provides current knowledge and builds on WHO guidance to provide key considerations for implementation, including driving demand and improving quality, as well as focus on wider combination prevention and integration agendas.

Adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) remain disproportionately affected by HIV in eastern and southern Africa, however, they face many personal, social and structural barriers to access, uptake and use of traditional HIV prevention methods. Oral Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is proven to be highly effective as an additional prevention choice for reducing the risk of HIV acquisition, but the current demand for PrEP by AGYW is low with suboptimal adherence.

Within the region, there is currently great impetus to address these challenges and scale up PrEP for AGYW. A critical aspect of this is to leverage the learnings and evidence from implementation of how to improve the demand and quality of PrEP programming for this population. Improving the Quality of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Implementation for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Eastern and Southern Africa is informed by knowledge and lessons learned emerging from a virtual thank tank and webinar convened by UNICEF together with WHO AFRO and the Global Fund, with support from the SIDA funded 2gether 4 SRHR programme, in early 2021.

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EVIDENCE UPDATE 2024

Over the past three years, the PrEP landscape has evolved significantly including for AGYW in Eastern and Southern Africa who continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV. The evidence update titled: Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Eastern and Southern Africa: The latest insights, aims to enhance the quality and coverage of PrEP programming for AGYW. The brief, developed by AVAC, UNICEF and the Global Fund, summarizes the most recent evidence on AGYW PrEP provision and serves as a supplement to the original 2021 implementation brief.

This Technical Brief provides updated guidance to Global Fund applicants and implementers to leverage Global Fund financing that will further advance progress in scaling up effective programming for AGYW, in line with global partner guidance and global targets and initiatives such as the Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free Joint Agenda and the Global HIV Prevention Coalition Agenda.

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.

The AGYW Programming & Implementation Repository contains resources relevant to AGYW programming that have been collated to support enhanced implementation and programming of Global Fund Catalytic Funding for HIV prevention among AGYW in Eastern and Southern Africa. Developed in collaboration with Global Fund in response to an identified need from the SEA sub-region, we are confident that you will all find the repository useful in your support of national AGYW programmes.

The repository is housed on Google Drive and is accessible without a Gmail account. The resources are organized in folders by key programming area and are easily searchable through a google sheet. Powerpoint slides have also been developed to help you navigate through the repository.

The spreadsheet and slideshow are available for download above.

Key Considerations for Introducing New HIV Point-of-Care Diagnostic Technologies in National Health Systems, and the HIV Point-of-Care Diagnostics Toolkit

A documentation of case studies from Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam on Young Key Population involvement in the Global Fund processes