This year's UNAIDS performance report demonstrates how the UN Joint Programme on HIV and AIDS has critically contributed to key areas of the global HIV response and to saving lives, even in the face of the severe challenges and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and financial shortfalls impacting the global HIV response and UNAIDS.
The report outlines progress, across the 6 regions covered by the Joint Programme in 8 strategy result areas and 5 functions, in ensuring effective and well-coordinated support to countries and communities, resources mobilization, strategic partnerships, strategic information, and effective governance and accountability.
It shows UNAIDS high performance against the plan, measured through quantitative and qualitative data.
UNAIDS critical achievements for countries and communities include:
- UNAIDS helped 15 countries to achieve elimination of mother to child transmission.
- UNAIDS helped 130 countries to adopt oral Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in their national guidelines.
- UNAIDS helped 28 countries of the Global HIV Prevention Coalition to develop national roadmaps and targets, improving condom needs estimates, scaling up of prevention, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, especially for adolescent girls and women as well as key populations.
- UNAIDS helped promote innovations including self-testing, multi-month dispensing of ART (now adapted in 90% of low- and middle- income countries), and digital solutions for health, worldwide, which have been vital to continuity during service disruptions from the COVID-19 crisis.
- UNAIDS supported 90 countries to improve their enabling environments, including their legal and regulatory frameworks.
- UNAIDS supported the empowerment of women and girls and transformations of unequal gender norms, including through the Education Plus initiative that is building political and public momentum to ensure that all adolescent girls in Sub-Saharan Africa secure access to secondary education and a package of empowerment support.
- UNAIDS contributed to improved HIV-sensitive social protection systems in 66 countries It also helped expand community-led HIV responses including alternative models for their sustainable financing in 10 countries and community-led monitoring in 24 countries.
- UNAIDS helped 380 cities join the Fast Track cities network, and translated political commitments into investments, better policies and programmes for people living with, affected by and at risk of HIV.
- Through its guidance and technical support to Global Fund's country coordination mechanism in 77 countries, UNAIDS guided more than 80% of Global Fund's funding requests for evidence-informed prioritization, representing US$ 5 billion in HIV funding, and supportive effective implementation. In addition, UNAIDS catalyzed greater focus and investment on prevention in 30 countries leading to approximately $200million additional Global Fund resources for HIV prevention since 2017, and supported 12 Global Fund strategic initiatives on HIV, resulting in increased funding for condom programming, human rights and gender. UNAIDS close collaboration with the Global fund also helped secure continuity of vital HIV services disrupted by the COVID-19 crisis.
- UNAIDS monitoring and reporting of the impact of COVID-19 on essential services and on peoples' rights helped worldwide in policy mitigations and in policy reforms.
- UNAIDS brought global attention to the inequalities connecting the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics, including through its leading role in urging equitable access to pandemic-ending technologies, in the People's Vaccine campaign and in its support for the Accelerated COVID Testing (ACT) initiative.
- Across all its work through UN Joint Teams on AIDS in over 90 countries as part of UN Country responses, UNAIDS fostered dialogues on HIV sensitive issues, finding solutions for people left behind, including in people in closed settings, in humanitarian situations and in mobile and migrant populations. It also promoted and supported the participation and empowerment of communities living with and affected by HIV, including young people, women and girls, and key populations.
Funding shortfalls in the global HIV response continued to limit progress in key areas, especially for vulnerable groups of people. The stark reality at the end of 2020 is that only US$ 21.5 billion (in constant 2019 U.S. dollars) was available for the HIV response in low- and middle-income countries--far short of the US$ 29 billion needed by 2025 to get on track to end AIDS. Likewise, important capacities as a UN Joint Programme have been eroded by the underfunding of the Unified Budget, Results and Accountability Framework. In order to achieve progress, save lives and ensure that people living with or at risk of HIV have access to the services and resources that they need, the global HIV response needs to be fully resourced.
The 2021 UN General Assembly's Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS and the 2021-2026 Global AIDS Strategy have set an ambitious agenda ahead. This includes the global AIDS 2025 targets of 95-95-95 and 10-10-10, developed by UNAIDS, aiming at removing punitive laws and policies and reducing stigma, discrimination, gender inequalities and violence that hamper access to HIV services. Only through bold and coordinated action to tackle inequalities can the world's 2025 targets be met.
