2017

More women are accessing antiretroviral therapy than men, transferring the benefits of their good health to their families and economies. When young women are empowered and have their rights fulfilled, HIV prevalence falls, there are fewer unintended pregnancies, fewer maternal deaths and fewer dropouts from school and more women join the workforce.

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. 

This poster presented at ICASA 2017 highlights a promising intervention to improve client retention in HIV programmes. Beginning in 2015 in Malawi, a collaboration between the Ministry of Health, UNICEF, and UNC-Project Malawi introduced a community-based Expert Client (EC) intervention with a particular focus on HIV-exposed infants and mothers enrolled in the national PMTCT programme.

This promising practice reviews the rationalization process and a coordination and planning workshop conducted by OHTA and Ministry of Health representatives for partners working on HIV prevention and PMTCT within certain health zones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Outcomes of the programme, key lessons learned and considerations for scale up are included in this report. 

This research poster summarizes findings on early mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV among adolescents and young women from three national surveys in South Africa for 2010, 2011-2012 and 2012-2013. 

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.