Adolescent Prevention

There is overwhelming evidence that multiple social, economic, and structural factors perpetuate inequalities and increase human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) risk among adolescents, including poverty and other vulnerabilities addressed by social protection programmes.

To better understand the role of social protection in addressing these complex and multidimensional determinants of HIV, UNICEF conducted a systematic review to examine the evidence on cash plus or ‘bundled’ multisectoral interventions and their impacts on new HIV infections, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and outcomes and risk factors to HIV/STIs among adolescents and young people in Africa. 

To date, this is the first review to examine bundled economic strengthening and health interventions — including but not limited to social protection — to draw lessons for developing and scaling up multi-sectoral programmes, including social protection, and making them HIV-sensitive.

The newly released research brief summarizes a longer paper by Kate Rogers, Rikke Le Kirkegaard, Joyce Wamoyi, Kaley Grooms, Shaffiq Essajee and Tia Palermo, titled Systematic review of cash plus or bundled interventions targeting adolescents in Africa to reduce HIV risk, published on BMC Public Health in January 2024.

This year's World AIDS Day theme is "Take the rights path". For this occasion, UNICEF published the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional 2024 Snapshot, featuring a regional overview of HIV trends, including vertical transmission, testing, and treatment for children and adolescents, as well as gender disparities affecting adolescent girls and young women.

As part of the 2gether 4 SRHR joint UN programme, UNICEF ESARO in collaboration with Y+ Global and UNFPA ESARO, developed six key question and answer (Q&A) resource documents on HIV and SRH for adolescents and young people in ESA. The toolkit has been developed to assist country teams in improving knowledge and understanding, driving adolescent and youth engagement and behaviour change,​ and promoting uptake of services in ESA. The content has been developed with adolescents and young people. Part of a broader toolkit, the content is intended for adaptation and use across multiple SBC platforms, including digital approaches scripts for radio shows and peer counselling sessions.

Each Q&A has approximately 10 questions, and links to the other topic areas:

• Healthy relationships
• Staying safe
• Sex and other stuff
• All about HIV
• Living with HIV
• Being a young parent
• Understanding Puberty
• The HPV Vaccine
• Talking with Your Children

Click and watch on how to access and use the toolkit

Eastern and southern Africa (ESA) is the world’s most heavily HIV-impacted region, with adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) disproportionately affected. To support the scale-up of PrEP amongst AGYW in ESA, in September 2021 UNICEF and partners released the implementation brief “Improving the Quality of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Implementation for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Eastern and Southern Africa,” highlighting considerations to help improve the quality and coverage of AGYW PrEP programming.

The PrEP landscape has evolved significantly in the three years since the original brief was released, both in scale and variety. This updated brief summarises the most recent evidence on AGYW PrEP provision, serving as a supplement to the original 2021 implementation brief.