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For women all over the world, getting the products and services they need and want for HIV prevention and for sexual & reproductive health (SRH) are mired in challenges – and COVID-19 is intensifying the struggle. Siloed care, stock outs, and too little input from women themselves on the design of programs and products are among the long-standing barriers to women’s healthcare, and COVID-19 exacerbates these difficulties. AVAC is expanding our partnerships and programs to meet these challenges.
Effective integration of HIV/SRH requires multilayered prevention, an issue highlighted in AVAC Report 2019: Now What?. Multilayered prevention can—and should—encompass both SRH and HIV services and products, including multipurpose prevention technologies (MPTs), and embed these services and products in “multisectoral strategies”, such as policy reform, community norms-changing and economic empowerment.
The need for integration isn’t new, but the current global COVID-19 crisis makes stark the challenge and the need.
While AVAC has long promoted a research agenda centered on women, the ECHO trial results, on the one hand, and the opportunities and challenges of oral PrEP programs, on the other, underscore the urgency to reach women and girls with integrated HIV and family planning products and services.
In partnerships with civil society, Ministries of Health, product developers and program implementers, we’re taking a comprehensive approach to advancing the integration of HIV services and SRH—including advocacy, research and implementation. To learn more about what we’re doing, check out the following resources:
- In our latest blog, we outline our approach to advancing HIV/SRH integration.
- A suite of new resources offers tools for developing integration strategies, drawn from insights learned from experiences to date with integrating HIV and SRH.
- And our new page on avac.org devoted to HIV/SRH integration provides a look at key partnerships with civil society, governments, donors and product developers to strengthen integration in research, policies, products and services.
This work reflects a renewed urgency to identify and overcome obstacles to the integration of services for HIV and SRH, and to bring new resources to the field so that women’s too-often-neglected needs become the priority.
Keep checking our webpage for the latest updates on work to integrate HIV and SRH.