Building Health Systems Capacity Reaching HIV Epidemic Viral Suppression Targets in All Children and Adolescents

Overview

Great progress has been made by many countries in reaching the UN 95-95-95 targets for HIV epidemic control, and several countries are approaching or have achieved them. However, children and adolescents living with HIV (CALHIV) consistently fall behind adults in reaching these targets, and the third 95 target of sustained viral suppression among these populations is particularly difficult to achieve. During last decade, the New Horizons Collaborative, funded by Johnson & Johnson and supported by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) and Partnership for Supply Chain Management, has been working with countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to advance high-quality, sustainable care for treatment-experienced CALHIV. Right to Care, Imperial Logistics and CIPHER were previous collaborators in New Horizons.

The New Horizons Collaborative supports:

• Health systems strengthening and capacity building among healthcare workers (HCWs);
• Decentralization of pediatric and adolescent HIV care and treatment decision making;
• The development of data tracking systems for CALHIV with unsuppressed viral load (VL);
• Antiretroviral drug resistance testing (DRT);
• Antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimen switch decisions;
• Knowledge sharing and disseminating generated evidence through conference abstracts, manuscripts, technical tools, and annual technical workshops.

As of 2024, ten countries are members of the collaborative: Cameroon, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.