By Prudence Arobani
New York – The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has launched new initiatives, the Western and Central Africa Catch-up Plan, to help end AIDS on the continent by 2030.
The initiatives were launched at the AIDS Watch Africa Heads of State and Government Meeting during the 29th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, UNAIDS said on Tuesday.
UNAIDS said the plan, a “community health workers initiative, aims to recruit, train and deploy two million community health workers across Africa by 2020.
“The Western and Central Africa catch-up plan aims to rapidly accelerate access to HIV treatment in the region and close the gap in access between African regions”.
The plan is under the leadership of countries and regional economic communities, and in collaboration with UNAIDS, the World Health Organisation, Doctors Without Borders and other partners.
The catch-up plan in western and central Africa, which started implementation in late 2016, seeks to dramatically accelerate the scale-up of HIV testing, prevention and treatment programmes, with the goal of putting the region on the Fast-Track to meet the 90–90–90 targets by December 2020.
“While the world witnesses significant progress in responding to HIV, with 57 per cent of all people living with HIV knowing their HIV status, 46 per cent of all people living with HIV accessing treatment and 38 per cent of all people living with HIV virally suppressed in 2015.
“However, the western and central Africa region lags behind, achieving only 36 per cent, 28 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively, in 2015.”
“The gap is considerable: 4.7 million people living with HIV are not receiving treatment, and 330,000 adults and children died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2015.
“We cannot accept a two-speed approach to ending AIDS in Africa,” UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé, said.
“To put western and central Africa on track to end AIDS, we must address stigma, discrimination and other challenges to an effective response, allocate funding to support the most effective strategies and implement delivery strategies that reach the communities most in need.”
According to Sidibé, the catch-up plan will aim to increase the number of people on treatment from 1.8 million to 2.9 million by mid-2018, giving an additional 1.2 million people, including 120,000 children, access to urgently needed treatment.
The first call for a catch-up plan for the region was made at the UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS in June 2016.
Since then, at least 10 countries have developed country operational plans deriving from the western and central Africa catch-up plan with a focus on ensuring the needed policy and structural changes.
The 10 countries are Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal and Sierra Leone.
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