EGPAF’s Statement at the UNAIDS 47th PCB Meeting: Agenda 8 – UNAIDS Strategy

EGPAF wants to express our appreciation to UNAIDS for the broad consultative process and the development of the annotated outline of the Global AIDS Strategy 2021-2016.

Today, 1.8 million children live with HIV. Even before COVID-19 disruptions took hold, new pediatric HIV infections were on the rise in a handful of countries, jeopardizing the gains made towards eliminating pediatric AIDS. Pediatric treatment coverage has stalled, and we have failed to identify and reach almost half of the children living with HIV. Although there has been global progress, none of the targets set out for 2018 or 2020 have been reached.

UNAIDS’ past and current strategies mobilized leadership, built initiatives, and scaled up innovations to respond to HIV among children and adolescents. We need UNAIDS political advocacy to prioritize children and pregnant women; increase the sense of urgency; and mobilize global, country, and local leadership to achieve an AIDS-free generation.

With this statement, we want to emphasize five main points on the annotated outline of the strategy:

• We are pleased to see the inclusion of Strategy Result Area 2: Vertical Transmission and Pediatric AIDS in the Global Strategy. Specifically, we commend the proposed inclusion of a mid-point treatment target for 2023 for children. We need a better understanding on funding needs and gaps to achieve maternal and pediatric HIV targets. UNAIDS must describe how it will contribute to this endeavor through the UBRAF.
• We appreciate the stronger focus on integration, as this is happening at a very slow pace and in very limited settings. And would like to see mention to strengthening the linkages between pediatric and maternal HIV and other health services, such as SRH care, antenatal care, tuberculosis, cervical cancer, nutrition, triple elimination, and immunization programs as it is absolutely essential. The strategy should explore opportunities to increase coordination between the different disease programs; innovative financing mechanisms for combining disease responses; adoption of innovations such as routine use of dual rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for HIV/syphilis; among others.
• The strategy must serve as a catalyst to accelerate the R&D, introduction and scale up of maternal and pediatric HIV innovations, including better medicines and formulations, optimized POC EID, new prevention technologies, evidence-based strategies for pediatric HIV case finding, effective community-led interventions, among others. The implementation of multi-stakeholders initiatives such as the Rome Action Plan can address some of the challenges to introduce innovations. We believe the Global Strategy should build on those kind of platforms to speed up implementation.
• While we acknowledge the ambitious scope of the strategy, it is necessary to ensure focus and prioritization. It would be important for UNAIDS to specify how it will contribute to the proposed global strategy through the UBRAF. Furthermore, its implementation will need increased political leadership across all actors to bring a common vision and mobilize political will to achieve an AIDS Free Generation.
• Finally, country support and country leadership will be the game changer. We ask UNAIDS program to increased country leadership to support country implementation of the Global AIDS Strategy.