This policy brief outlines the key pathways through which social protection can address risk factors and contribute to preventing new HIV infections. It highlights country-level initiatives and provides policy implications and recommendations.

This brief is coauthored by UNICEF and Economic Policy Research Institute. University of Oxford, UNDP and the Transfer Project have contributed to content reflected in this brief, and USAID has endorsed the brief.

This review provides a conceptual framework for HIV-sensitive social protection policies and programmes and review the impact of social protection on HIV prevention and treatment outcomes in addition to social and economic care and support. It further provides recommendations for achieving core HIV impacts, comprehensive approaches, and expanding and sustaining HIV-sensitive social protection. 

This working paper from UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti makes the case for investing in social protection efforts for adolescents. Reviewing governmental programmes, the paper examines whether and how current non-contributory social protection programmes are adolescent sensitive, and what their impacts are on adolescents.

This research brief defines 'cash plus' interventions, the menu of 'plus' components, and summarizes the evidence on their broad-ranging impacts. It further identifies lessons learned on how to make these integrated interventions work.

‘Cash plus’ interventions combine cash transfers with one or more types of complementary support. Types of complementary support can consist of (i) components that are provided as integral elements of the cash transfer intervention, such as through the provision of additional benefits or in-kind transfers, information or behaviour change communication (BCC), or psychosocial support, and (ii) components that are external to the intervention but offer explicit linkages into services provided by other sectors, such as through direct provision of access to services, or facilitating linkages to services.

Building on previous summaries, this brief summarizes the current evidence and lessons learned from the Transfer Project after more than a decade of research on cash transfers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Since 2009, the Transfer Project has generated rigorous evidence on the impacts of cash transfers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and has supported their expansion. It aims to provide evidence on the effectiveness of cash transfer programmes, inform the development and design of cash transfer policy and programmes, and promote learning across SSA on the design and implementation of research and evaluations on cash transfers. The Transfer Project is a collaborative network comprising UNICEF (Innocenti, Regional and Country Offices), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, national governments and researchers. 

ALL In to #EndAdolescentAIDS

Around the world, an estimated 2.1 million adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 years were living with HIV in 2016. Some 260,000 older adolescents (aged 15–19 years) were newly infected with HIV in 2016, or nearly  a new infection every two minutes. Nearly three out of four new infections occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. And adolescent girls continue to be disproportionately affected. Globally, nearly two thirds (65 per cent) of new HIV infections among adolescents aged 15–19 years were among girls.

Progress in preventing new infections among adolescents remains unacceptably slow, with new infections declining by only 14 per cent since 2010. Equally concerning, between 2000 and 2015, annual AIDS-related deaths declined for all age groups except adolescents (aged 10–19 years).

Demographic realities further undermine recent hopeful trends. In sub-Saharan Africa, the region most affected by HIV, the youth population has begun to explode in size and will continue to do so, with projections indicating that the number of people younger than 20 will double in 2030. That means redoubled efforts will be necessary to prevent an increase in new HIV infections among adolescents.

The Optimizing HIV Treatment Access (OHTA) Initiative (2012—2017), funded by Sweden and Norway through UNICEF, supported the scale-up of lifelong antiretroviral therapy (ART) for pregnant and breastfeeding women living with HIV. The project focused on four countries with a high HIV burden: Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi and Uganda. OHTA aimed to strengthen health systems to deliver lifelong treatment (also known as ‘Option B+’) for pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers living with HIV.

The three objectives of OHTA were:

1. More effective delivery of treatment for pregnant women and mothers living with HIV by strengthening the capacity of the primary health-care system;
2. Increase demand timely utilization and retention rates in prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) services;
3. Strengthening monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts to improve health service delivery for pregnant and breastfeeding women living with HIV and their children.

PROMISING PRACTICES FROM THE OHTA INITIATIVE