PMTCT

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 toolkit — prepared by members of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Nigeria and Atlanta, the University of Nigeria, the Healthy Sunrise Foundation, and the National AIDS and STI Control Program of Nigeria — provides implementers with the background, procedures, and resources/tools to support the implementation of Baby Showers in Congregational Settings. In PEPFAR programmes, countries are moving toward elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (EMTCT). One gap in achieving EMTCT is reaching women and their infants who do not come to the facility for care. The Baby Showers approach in Nigeria is one way of reaching women and their families in the community through faith-based congregations, with a strong evidence base to support its positive impact.

Baby Showers are celebratory gatherings for pregnant women and their partners with routine celebrations marked by prayers for the safe delivery of babies and to support parents-to-be as they prepare for their new arrival. Health screening, including HIV testing for pregnant women and their partners, is offered during the celebration that brings women, their partners, and their newborns together in a congregation. Other countries have expressed interest in learning from Nigeria’s experience. This resource has been adapted for implementation in additional settings and contexts and includes six accompanying tools in the appendix to aid in data collection and documentation.

This review of prevention of maternal-to-child transmission (PMTCT) services in the Kyrgyz Republic was undertaken to: (1) provide an overview of milestones in the delivery and expansion of PMTCT for the period 2017-2020; identify the main barriers to PMTCT for women and infants; (3) describe the status of the country’s preparations for validation of elimination of mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) for HIV and syphilis; and (4) provide recommendations to accelerate the country’s progress in strengthening PMTCT services and defining a pathway to application for global validation of elimination of MTCT of HIV and syphilis.

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.

UNICEF’s HIV/AIDS Thematic Fund is a global flexible funding pool. It enables us to strengthen systems to ensure an AIDS-free future for children and adolescents. This offers donors an exciting opportunity to target funding specifically to HIV/AIDS outcomes, while also giving UNICEF the flexibility to allocate funds based on where the need is greatest for children, including critically underfunded priorities at the country level, humanitarian response activities, and where funds will have the greatest impact. Thanks to our generous donors UNICEF’s Global HIV/ AIDS Thematic Fund income in 2022 reached over $5.7 million.

This document features the results achieved in 2022, when supporters of the HIV/AIDS Thematic Fund enabled UNICEF to allocate resources to 45 countries and territories. Funds were allocated to countries based on several measures determining the burden of HIV/AIDS on the population. These included the number of AIDS-related deaths in the country and the number of new infections among children and adolescents in the country. Funds were also allocated to UNICEF’s regional and global headquarters, supporting the vital work that allows thematic funding to unlock wide-scale results and impact the world over.

The report outlines the progress and achievements in the triple elimination of vertical transmission of HIV, syphilis, and hepatitis B in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) over the last two decades. The data mentorship programme aims to strengthen national health management information systems, improve data quality, and build the analytical skills of government staff working towards elimination. It employs a unique partnership model with the private sector, academia, and government officials, focusing on capacity building through virtual and in-person mentoring, online learning platforms, and workshops. The programme has shown early successes, with mentees from various countries implementing operational plans to improve data quality and analysis in their respective countries.

Empowered mentees are taking up leadership roles that directly support national programmes and 'Path to Elimination' validation processes. The geographical expansion of the programme and the continuous exposure of mentees to technical learning opportunities will further enhance each country’s preparedness towards the 'Path to Elimination' and validation. The design, approach and delivery of this programme can be used as a blueprint for building national and regional capacity, skills building, and mentorship. While this particular data mentorship programme focuses on vertical transmission and the Path to Elimination, the principles of data quality, data sources, collection and reporting, data visualisations, and data use remain consistent across healthcare programmes and can be applied more broadly to build data use capacity in maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and sexual and reproductive health.

This is the first report on progress towards the triple elimination of mother-to-child transmission (EMTCT) of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B virus (HBV) across 23 countries in the Middle East and North Africa/ Eastern Mediterranean (MENA/EM) region.

Countries included in this report: Algeria, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, State of Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.

To support countries in the region to achieve triple elimination goals, this report collects and assesses national policies and key indicators on EMTCT efforts against WHO criteria for validation of the EMTCT of HIV, syphilis and HBV. Based on analysis and consultations with national policymakers, the report provides a Road Map  for countries at different stages of readiness to follow towards triple elimination goals. The report also provides a set of recommendations for all countries to prioritize EMTCT policy and programming actions over the short, medium, and long term.

Despite global progress in HIV treatment for children, the gap between adult and paediatric treatment coverage continues to widen. This gap is driven primarily by barriers to HIV diagnosis in children, but in the past decade those barriers have shifted.

Scaling-up HIV case-finding efforts for children presents several challenges, including limited access to testing services, lack of provider preparedness to offer testing to children, stigma and discrimination, policy barriers related to age of consent, and inadequate health systems. The aim of this technical brief is to offer countries a guide to address these challenges and enhance HIV case-finding for children to improve testing coverage for children at risk for HIV. This technical brief 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.

This key considerations document, developed by UNICEF and WHO, expands on the 2020 “last mile” operational guidance, with specific considerations for countries with lower HIV prevalence. It builds on the experiences of countries that have been validated for EMTCT of HIV and syphilis and translates the valuable lessons and promising practices of these countries into an operational framework for national programmes, consisting of 12 strategies and enablers to guide efforts towards Fast-Tracking EMTCT in lower prevalence countries.

It is based on a review of experiences, key lessons learned and promising practices in implementation of EMTCT interventions in lower prevalence countries, including Sri Lanka and Thailand, which have been validated by WHO for having eliminated vertical transmission of HIV, and three countries with the potential to achieve EMTCT by 2030: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and India.

This brief reviews existing resources and analyses potential bottlenecks for the processes in applying for EMTCT/Path to Elimination and to strengthen ongoing PMTCT programmes in such applications. Eight UNICEF priority countries were selected for the review: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.