West and Central Africa

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.

The 22nd International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA) is taking place in Harare, Zimbabwe on 4-9 December, 2023. Download UNICEF's Roadmap below to find conference sessions related to children, adolescents and pregnant women.

Please also refer to the roadmap from Y+ Global for an overview of all youth-focused or youth-led sessions and save-the-dates for satellite sessions convened by UNICEF and partners.

The AU Summit Brochure was created after the inaugural countries leading the Global Alliance to end AIDS in Children met together with community representatives, UN agencies, stakeholders and partners gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on February 1st, 2023. This was done to discuss our progress and our plans to end AIDS in Children by 2030 and this brochure highlights each AU country's Global Alliance action plan.

This document outlines the fundamentals of PMTCT impact determination and provides considerations for development of pragmatic, streamlined and resource-efficient systems for MTCT estimate generation in high burden settings. The guidance attempts to acknowledge the current reality of PMTCT programme data and the need for reliable MTCT rates while also encouraging a forward-looking approach towards sustainable PMTCT programme data improvements.

Note that this document is intended for countries in sub-Saharan Africa with a high prevalence of HIV among women of reproductive age. Although many of the underlying principles are relevant to settings with a lower burden of HIV, the guidance is not targeted for those programmes.

The tools in appendix 2 can be accessed here.

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. 

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. 

In the global quest to end the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030, meeting the HIV-related needs of children, adolescents and pregnant and breastfeeding women represents a critical piece of unfinished business. To inject a sense of urgency in to global efforts to end the epidemic among children, adolescents and young women, global partners joined together in 2015 to launch the Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free framework. Unveiled as the global community was embracing a series of 2020 targets intended to Fast-Track the HIV response, Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free called for a super-Fast-Track approach to end AIDS as a public health threat among children, adolescents and young women by 2020.

Since the deadline for achieving the targets passed in December 2020, this is the final Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free progress report. Although the targets were global, partners identified 23 countries for intensified focus under the framework. This report specifically highlights progress against the targets in focus countries. The only focus countries outside sub-Saharan Africa (India and Indonesia) do not report data on Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free targets and are not covered in this report. 

HIV testing and treatment remains low among children in West and Central Africa. Various barriers prevent the scale-up of services and improved coverage for children, including limited coverage of early infant diagnostic capacity, limited decentralization of pediatric treatment including task-shifting/sharing from paediatricians to nurses and community actors, as well as prevalent HIV stigma at individual, family and community levels. Family-based HIV index testing has been identified as a game changer that can deliver quick gains for the paediatric HIV response in both high- and low prevalence settings. By using an individual family member living with HIV as an entry point to reaching the entire family unit, several underlying factors can be addressed, which limit access to HIV testing services especially for children.

This operational guidance is meant for use by national programme managers, implementers, advocates and health care providers in collaboration with partners, supported by national, regional and global experts. The guidance draws off the experience in family testing from within and outside West and Central Africa. It combines recommendations from the Dakar Expert consultation, which took place in June 2018, as well as lessons learned from the pilot of the Family Testing Operational Guidance in Liberia in June 2018. It is a living document that will be enriched as evidence on family Testing in the region grows. The use of this guidance will be complemented by a toolkit and a community of practice. It is a regional document drafted for the countries in West and Central Africa to guide country teams to design country-contextualized family HIV testing roll-out.

This guide developed by Pediatric-Adolescent Treatment Africa (PATA) draws on lessons learned on integrating peer support strategies across several programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. It has been designed as an informative resource for the integration of peer support into HIV models of care for adolescents and young people in facility- and community-based settings. This toolkit is aimed primarily at health providers, specifically health facility managers and organizations engagement peer support programmes to strengthen health care./p>