Treatment in children living with HIV
To ensure that every child thrives, it is imperative that we scale up access to ART.
In 2023, an estimated 1.37 million children aged 0–14 years were living with HIV globally, yet a staggering 43% of these children—over half a million—were unable to access life-saving antiretroviral therapy (ART). This alarming figure not only highlights a significant gap in our healthcare systems but also falls dramatically short of the 2030 target of achieving 95% ART coverage among children living with HIV. The consequences of this inadequate access to treatment are dire. Research indicates that without timely intervention, one-third of infants born with HIV will not survive past their first birthday, and half will succumb by age two.
To ensure that every child thrives, it is imperative that we scale up access to ART. We must prioritize investments in healthcare infrastructure, improve early diagnosis, and scale up HIV case finding among children beyond infancy to ensure timely treatment for all affected. Every child deserves a chance at a healthy future, and it is our collective responsibility to make that a reality.
Below are links to key tools, documents, and resource materials to help programmes enhance outcomes for children living with HIV.
Key resources
Improving HIV Service Delivery for Infants, Children and Adolescents: A framework for country programming
The Paediatric Service Delivery Framework presents strategies to address bottlenecks across the continuum of care for each population: infants, children and adolescents. It describes comprehensive and targeted service delivery models, which emphasize strong linkages between testing, treatment and care, and between communities and facilities.
Technical brief on paediatric HIV case-finding: beyond infant testing
Scaling up HIV case-finding efforts for children is constrained by limited access to testing, stigma and policy barriers. This technical brief guides countries to enhance HIV case-finding and improve testing coverage for at-risk children. It 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.
HIV prevention, testing, treatment, service delivery and monitoring
These guidelines provide guidance on the diagnosis of HIV infection, the care of people living with HIV and the use of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for treating and preventing HIV infection. They are structured along the continuum of HIV testing, prevention, treatment and care. This edition updates the 2016 WHO consolidated guidelines, including updates and guidelines produced since.
Operational guidance for national roll-out of family HIV testing in West and Central Africa
This operational 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. 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.
