AGYW

UNICEF’s 2024 Global Snapshot, released for World AIDS Day, offers a concise yet critical overview of the global HIV and AIDS landscape, focusing on children, adolescents, and pregnant women. This year’s report highlights key data and insights, emphasizing the urgent need to eliminate vertical transmission of HIV and ensure universal access to testing and treatment for children and adolescents. Ending AIDS by 2030 is not just an achievable goal—it is a moral imperative to uphold the rights and dignity of every child and adolescent.

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.

This status report shows how far we have come—and how much further we must go—if we hope to meet the global commitments to end AIDS in children. It offers a snapshot of global progress and permits an early assessment of the impact of the Global Alliance’s work. This report highlights the transformative work that is being undertaken in Global Alliance countries to accelerate gains towards ending AIDS in children, underscoring the urgent need to apply good practices, emerging innovations and critical lessons learned to overcome the barriers that slow progress.

For additional information, consult the joint press release and the video created for the report launch at AIDS 2024.

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.

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.