Programme

We stand at a historic moment. After decades of progress in HIV prevention, treatment, and care, an AIDS-free generation is finally within reach. In the last 20 years, 1.5 million deaths have been averted among children. UNICEF is committed to ending AIDS by 2030—we know what works; we just need to scale it up and sustain it.

The Challenge

Since 2000, the number of new pediatric infections has decreased significantly, but despite incredible progress, children and adolescents, especially girls, are being left behind. In 2023:

Only 57 percent of children with HIV received treatment, compared to 77 percent of adults.
Every day, almost 300 children and adolescents died from AIDS-related causes.
71 percent of new HIV infections among adolescents occurred in girls and young women.
Outside sub-Saharan Africa, one in three pregnant women living with HIV still lacked access to lifesaving treatment.

This is the moment for renewed global efforts to reach the last mile to end AIDS in children and adolescents.

Download the document

The Investment Opportunity

Every dollar invested in HIV prevention generates up to $6.44 in economic returns in low- and middle-income countries. Yet resources allocated to HIV fall short of global targets each year. UNAIDS calls for an investment of USD $29 billion by 2025 to meet the needs of low- and middle-income countries for HIV prevention and treatment services, integration and other health services, societal enablers, and managing and tracking the response.

Why UNICEF?

As the world’s leading organization for children and a technical agency, UNICEF brings extensive experience, unique strengths, and proven results to the HIV/AIDS response. Under current resource constraints, UNICEF's multi-sectoral engagement and capabilities are critical for efficient and effective care delivery.

Expert Staff & Global Reach

Over 100 technical experts deployed across 37 priority countries.
Present with HIV programs in nearly 100 countries.
Largest operational capacity of any international provider of HIV programming for children.

Systems Approach

Integration with education, child protection, and social protection.
HIV-sensitive, gender-informed programming.
Strengthening both health facilities and community systems.

Innovation & Scale

Digital platforms for youth engagement.
Ability to take successful programs to national scale.
Work towards enabling access to cutting-edge PrEP alternatives.

Emergency Response

Maintaining essential services during crises.
Long-term presence before, during, and after emergencies.

Read more about investing in HIV/AIDS through UNICEF HERE.

Our Track Record

Working with partners like CDC/PEPFAR, the Global Fund, and ViiV Healthcare, and through the United Nations Joint Programme on AIDS, we have achieved:

3.4 million HIV infections in children prevented.
15 countries certified as having halted vertical transmission of HIV.
82 percent of pregnant women living with HIV receiving treatment.

Investment Options

Option 1: Core Resources for Results

If you believe in the simple mission ‘for every child,’ this option may be for you. The unique challenges related to HIV may be of strong interest, but you also recognize that it takes support across all areas of a child’s life to ensure their well-being. Core Resources for Results, known in UNICEF as RR, is our most prized resource because it enables predictability and flexibility to achieve the greatest impact and efficiency by maintaining them as ‘unrestricted,’ reducing transaction costs and maximizing the funds that can go straight to children. Each year, 16 percent of total RR funding goes to achieving outcomes in HIV. You can designate a portion or all of your partnership to Core Resources for Results. Each year, we will share an engaging report that shows how your contribution played a part in achieving impact for children across all facets of their lives.

Option 2: HIV Thematic Funds

If you or your institution is dedicated to HIV, then you may want to consider UNICEF’s HIV Thematic Funds. Like RR, these funds provide high levels of predictability and flexibility while enabling you to target your funding to HIV results. You can designate your contribution to achieving global aims or to a specific country. The flexibility of thematic funds gives UNICEF the opportunity to balance the needs against the immense challenges facing children today and our ambitious targets. An HIV report shared with you each year will highlight a collection of key achievements, learnings, and stories of children’s experiences.

Read more about investing in the Thematic Fund HERE

Option 3: Specific HIV Priorities

For some of you, your organizational mission or your passions may lead you to fund a specific program. UNICEF has a long history of developing strategic partnerships to meet partners’ priorities and philanthropic goals. We also work with partners to complement financial investment with the technical expertise of their corporation or institution or by joining forces to advocate for nutrition. These bespoke partnerships see donors build long-term relationships with our experts and country offices to develop lasting and powerful initiatives that endure and can be scaled up to benefit children in the long term.

Strategic Investment

Here's what strategic investment in UNICEF can achieve:

$12 million can help close the treatment gap in 12 priority countries, increasing coverage by 25 percent.
$10 million can provide comprehensive support in three high-prevalence Southern African countries.
$1 million can ensure thousands of pregnant women receive and stay on HIV treatment.
$500,000 can build capacity for gender-responsive HIV services in a high-burden country.

Join Us

UNICEF is 100 percent voluntarily funded. Your support can help unlock the potential of existing investments and bring us closer to ending AIDS by 2030. Every investment brings us closer to an AIDS-free generation.

Resources:

HIV-Sensitive Social Protection

admin — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 15:43:49 +0000

HIV-Sensitive Social Protection admin Thu, 01/06/2022 - 17:43

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that social protection can reduce the risk of HIV infection and poor treatment outcomes by addressing some of the key drivers of HIV among children, adolescents and women, such as poverty, gender inequality, and lack of access to education or ability to stay in school.

Social protection covers a range of public and private economic and social policies and programmes that aim to reduce the consequences of poverty, vulnerability and exclusion across the life course. In recent years, cash transfer programmes have received increasing attention for their potential to exert significant positive impacts on HIV through influencing the social determinants of health.

The transition from adolescence to adulthood brings significant social, health and economic risks that all contribute to elevating the risk of HIV infection. At the same time, this is one of the best points in the life cycle to intervene to break the cycle of poverty and vulnerability. Cash transfers have been found to reduce the risk of HIV infection among adolescents, particular among girls and young women. Among the most vulnerable, cash transfers combined with complementary interventions or linkages to existing health and social services (“cash plus”) have been found to be the most effective models for reducing HIV-risk behaviour, psychosocial problems and lack of adherence to treatment in children and adolescents.

UNICEF is supporting various research projects that evaluate the impact of social protection and cash plus programmes on adolescents, health and well-being, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. For more information, visit UNICEF’s pages on social protection and cash plus or review the portfolio of The Transfer Project.

Social protection: a Fast-Track commitment to end AIDS

Guidance for policy-makers, and people living with, at risk of or affected by HIV. How to bring to scale what works in the context of different HIV epidemics and for different populations.

Download the resource

HIV and social protection assessment tool

Generating evidence for policy and action on HIV and social protection. Used for a quick scan of existing social protection programmes and their sensitivity (or lack of) to the HIV response in a given country and location.

Download the resource

Social Protection Policy Briefs

Research Implications for Policy by UNICEF, RIATT Coalition, Eastern and Southern Africa (2018)

Download the resource

Cash Plus Project Tanzania

Innovations in Diagnostics

admin — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 04:47:13 +0000

Innovations in Diagnostics admin Fri, 12/31/2021 - 06:47

Access to diagnostics to determine HIV infection is one of the major bottlenecks to timely treatment initiation in children and adults. Diagnostics for CD4 staging and monitoring, early infant diagnosis (EID) and viral load (VL) screening to monitor viral suppression have been historically offered using complex technologies, requiring test results to be sent away to central laboratories. Some HIV positive clients can wait for weeks or even months to receive test samples, contributing to loss to follow-up and causing delays that can have serious short-term and long-term impacts.

UNICEF has worked with partners and governments to ensure that laboratory testing services for children are optimized to enable rapid results, including through the use of point of care instruments for infant diagnosis and viral load testing. Faster clinical decision-making enables earlier initiation of treatment for HIV-positive infants; earlier interventions for patients with poor treatment adherence resulting in detectable viral load; and more timely switching of patients onto more effective regimens in case of treatment failure.

HIV Point of Care Diagnostic Toolkit

An extension of Key Considerations for Introducing New HIV Point of Care Diagnostic Technologies in National Health Systems, this Toolkit contains various practical tools and guidance to support countries as they introduce point-of-care (POC) HIV technologies into existing national diagnostic networks and laboratory systems.

Point-of-Care Diagnostics Toolkit
English version
French version

POC diagnostics Lessons Learned

Innovative POC diagnostics can be a game changer in health systems as it enables testing outside the laboratory and closer to patients, can be used for the diagnosis of multiple diseases, addresses key limitations of conventional laboratory networks, and significantly increases access to diagnostic testing in a decentralized fashion.

View the Lessons Learned

Treatment in Children Living with HIV

admin — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 03:43:39 +0000

Treatment in Children Living with HIV admin Fri, 12/31/2021 - 05:43

In 2023, an estimated 1.37 million children aged 0–14 years were living with HIV globally, yet a staggering 43% of these children—over half a million—were unable to access life-saving antiretroviral therapy (ART). This alarming figure not only highlights a significant gap in our healthcare systems but also falls dramatically short of the 2030 target of achieving 95% ART coverage among children living with HIV. The consequences of this inadequate access to treatment are dire. Research indicates that without timely intervention, one-third of infants born with HIV will not survive past their first birthday, and half will succumb by age two.

To ensure that every child thrives, it is imperative that we scale up access to ART. We must prioritize investments in healthcare infrastructure, improve early diagnosis, and scale up HIV case finding among children beyond infancy to ensure timely treatment for all affected. Every child deserves a chance at a healthy future, and it is our collective responsibility to make that a reality.

Below, we provide links to key tools, documents, and resource materials that can help programmes enhance outcomes for children living with HIV.

Improving HIV Service Delivery for Infants, Children and Adolescents: A framework for country programming

The Paediatric Service Delivery Framework presents strategies to address bottlenecks across the continuum of care for each population: infants, children and adolescents. It describes comprehensive and targeted service delivery models, which emphasize strong linkages between testing, treatment and care, and between communities and facilities.

Download framework

Technical Brief on Paediatric HIV Case-Finding: Beyond Infant Testing

Scaling up HIV case-finding efforts for children is constrained by limited access to testing, stigma and policy barriers. This technical brief guides countries to enhance HIV case-finding and improve testing coverage for at-risk children. It focuses primarily on how programmes can identify those children who may have missed out on EID testing, who were never tested after breastfeeding or whose mothers were not enrolled in care.

Access the brief

AIDS Free toolkit

This toolkit, developed by members of the AIDS Free Working Group, consists of the latest normative guidance, technical guidelines, policy briefs, case studies and advocacy resources to support efforts to achieve the AIDS Free targets in high-burden countries. Topics covered include advocacy, diagnosis, drug optimization, service delivery, community engagement, and monitoring and evaluation.

Access toolkit

HIV Prevention, Testing, Treatment, Service Delivery and Monitoring

WHO's consolidated guidelines, updated in 2021, bring together existing and new clinical and programmatic recommendations across different ages, populations and settings, bringing together all relevant WHO guidance on HIV produced since 2016. The guidelines are structured along the continuum of HIV care and provide expanded guidance on service delivery.

Download guidelines

Operational Guidance for National Roll-Out of Family HIV Testing in West and Central Africa

Informed by implementation lessons learned, this operational guidance aims to guide country teams to design country-contextualized family HIV testing roll-out in West and Central Africa. It is meant for use by national programme managers, implementers, advocates and health care providers in collaboration with partners and technical experts.

Download guidance