Promote Effective HIV Prevention Policy

AVAC’s core advocacy focus is accelerating the ethical development and global delivery of HIV prevention options, as part of a comprehensive and integrated response to the epidemic.

In alignment with that overall objective, AVAC advances complementary policy goals informed by the work of our programs and the insights of our global partners.

Policy Goals and Priorities

Robust and sustained support from funders (bilateral, multilateral and national) for the research and implementation of HIV prevention and treatment, with a special focus on:

• Increasing investment in women’s HIV prevention.
• A collaborative global agenda to advance women’s access to integrated SRHR and HIV prevention information and services.
• Supporting increased funding for the scale up of HIV prevention aimed at bringing the most effective interventions to the people and places with the greatest need.

Transparency in research and implementation. The process of both research and implementation must be founded on engagement with the communities where research is conducted and where HIV prevention is needed, and be accountable to those communities. This includes:

• Guiding and pressuring developers, funders and policymakers to develop comprehensive access plans for all products entering the product development pipeline.
• Engaging communities to guide the progress of new interventions through the regulatory approval process and the development of guidelines.
• Ensuring that governments, research agencies and key programs in the HIV response such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund use and share high-quality data; make transparent their investments, program decisions, and impact assessments; and are accountable to the communities they serve.

The development and funding of human-centered programs that ensure broad access to proven HIV prevention and treatment options for long-term impact. This includes:

• Identifying and advocating for actionable, people-centered strategies to increase the uptake and continuation of HIV prevention.
• Informing the future of clinical trial design and conduct, ensuring that civil society perspectives and priorities influence current and next-generation trial design and conduct.
• Supporting implementation research to close the gaps in treatment and prevention.
• Identification and elimination of the structural drivers of HIV incidence, including the criminalization of key populations, lack of universal health coverage and denial of sexual and reproductive health and rights, among others.
• Innovative tuberculosis research and programming.
• Elevating the connection between prevention, treatment, research and human rights.
• Ensuring that sound science, community engagement and the principles of health equity guide global responses to COVID-19.

Partnerships

We work with global partners and coalitions to advance our policy priorities: The Global AIDS Policy Partnership (GAPP), Federal AIDS Policy Partnership (FAPP), and the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC).

The GAPP is a coalition of over 70 US organizations—including advocates, civil society and faith-based organizations, philanthropy, implementers, professional membership organizations, and NGOs—committed to expanding and improving US global HIV/AIDS programming through PEPFAR and the Global Fund. AVAC staff directly support GAPP work, and AVAC helps lead the GAPP through Kevin Fisher’s role as GAPP co-chair.

GHTC is a coalition of more than 30 nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and aligned businesses working to accelerate the creation of new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and other tools accessible under principles of health equity.

FAPP is a national coalition of more than 120 local, regional, and national organizations advocating for federal funding, legislation and policy to end the HIV epidemic in the United States.

Since its founding in 1995, AVAC has maintained a policy that it does not accept pharmaceutical industry funding. This policy is designed to help safeguard AVAC’s role as an independent advocate for HIV prevention and health equity, and to reduce the possibility, or any possible appearance, of conflict of interest around AVAC advocacy on issues affecting the healthcare industry. Learn more about this in the AVAC Statement on Engagement with the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industry.