UNICEF, UNAIDS urge long vision and immediate action

CHANDAPIWA BAPUTAKI
Staff Writer | Friday April 30, 2010 00:00

 The report, released in December 2009, states that based on what is known today, priorities must be made for women, children and young people to have an opportunity to live and thrive AIDS free.

It stated that countries must accelerate the scale up of Prevention of Mother to Child Treatment (PMTCT) services and early infant diagnosis to contribute to the elimination of HIV transmission to young children.

The report called for the expansion of HIV prevention programmes for women of childbearing age together with expanded HIV testing and counselling of pregnant women and follow up of results.

The report called for provision of more efficacious ARV regiments for PMTCT, including ART for pregnant women in need of treatment, early infant diagnosis and follow up of these results and the immediate treatment of babies diagnosed with HIV.

According to the report, accelerated scale up will require a decentralised approach in which national programmes transfer the planning and implementation of services to sub-national levels, establishing clear mechanisms for coordination, financing and accountability.

The report indicated that it would require the effective engagement of communities as partners in service delivery and the establishment of better links between health facilities and local communities. The report further called for continually seeking out new evidence to inform HIV prevention as behaviour change will not be effective without a better understanding of the relationship between what young people know about HIV and how they actually behave on the basis of that knowledge.

In calling for action, the report called for support and empowerment of adolescents, particularly girls, to identify and respond to their own vulnerabilities.

It explained that there is an urgent need to address the factors that make girls and women more vulnerable to HIV infections.  In Southern Africa, evidence on patterns of early sexual debuts, concurrent partnerships, and intergenerational sex suggests the centrality of dealing with the social and cultural factors driving the epidemic among the females, including women' status, discrimination, violence against women and girls and gender disparities in education.

The report further called on countries to protect the rights of adolescents and young people living with HIV to receive good quality support and service and to ensure those in situations of the greatest risk are reached by HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services.

The report further called for countries to make sexual violence against girls and women socially unacceptable with focus on enforcing laws that make it punishable as a crime.

Countries have also been called upon to scale up child sensitive social protection, a necessary part of the response to children affected by AIDS, and strengthen community capacity to respond to the needs of children affected by AIDS by preventing the separation of families and improving the quality of alternative care.

The report also calls for improvement of data gathering and analysis to achieve results for children, and identification of gaps in equitable coverage of and access to services. The report stated that UNICEF and UNAIDS's commitments on closing the gaps in the global knowledge base and in honestly acknowledging where efforts fall short so that work may be improved.