Audit of Belgium’s international support for sexual health and HIV disappointing

1/12/2020

photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

Sensoa International's annual audit of the expenditures by the Belgian Directorate General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD) shows that spending on health and reproductive health in 2019 was at its lowest level in four years. DGD spent a total of 11.08% of its budget on health and reproductive health in 2019, whereas support halted at 13.29% in 2017 and 12.84% in 2016.

Particularly worrying is DGD's declining support for HIV prevention and treatment, for which the budget was cut in half during the previous government term. Support has been falling since 2017, with substantially less attention for HIV in Belgium’s bilateral cooperation and less support for multilateral organisations that take the lead in the global 'HIV response', such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM). Multilateral support did increase in 2019, but not enough to turn the tide.

What does it take to meet the need for sexual and and reproductive health services? Guttmacher did the math.

18/8/2020

Photo by Joshua Hanson

Guttmacher’s recently published 2019 “Adding it Up” report captures the shortages in sexual and reproductive health services in low and middle income countries (LMIC). The research institute calculated what it would take to bridge the gap.

Green light for vaginal HIV-prevention ring

18/8/2020

Photo by RHSC

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) published a positive opinion on the use of the dapivirine vaginal ring for women ages 18 and older in developing countries to reduce their risk of HIV-1 infection. The monthly ring is the first long-acting HIV prevention product and is designed to help address women’s unmet need for new prevention methods given the persistently high rates of HIV they face, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

COVID-19 pandemic must not be an excuse to divert investment from HIV

23/6/2020

Gains made in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV could be reversed, with new HIV infections among children up by as much as 162% and setting the clock on AIDS-related deaths back to 2008, a modelling group convened by the World Health Organization and UNAIDS estimated. If no efforts are made to mitigate and overcome interruptions in health services and supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, a six-month disruption of antiretroviral therapy could lead to more than 500,000 extra deaths from AIDS-related illnesses in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020–2021.

Lessons learned from the HIV-epidemic for the Covid 19 response?

20/4/2020

The 'community' which is fighting for sexual and reproductive rights has years of experience in the fight against that other pandemic, hiv. Important lessons can be drawn from this.

UNAIDS broke it down:

The response to the crisis must always be based on a Human Rights approach.
More vulnerable groups should be identified in a non-stigmatising way
Efforts should focus on those groups that would otherwise easily be excluded from care.
Health workers should thus be equipped with information and knowledge about the needs of the most vulnerable sections, such as women, people living in poverty, people living with an illness, people in rural areas, people with disabilities, people in detention, people living in slums or other informal settlements and the homeless.
Vulnerable sections of the population should be recognized themselves as health workers as they care family members, peer outreach, etc. In other words, they are also on the frontline of the epidemic. Their security and protection must therefore also be a priority.

‘How can we explain to young people today that we could not prevent them from becoming infected?'

11/12/2019

World Aids Day Seminar in the Belgian Senate. Copyright Sensoa.

For World Aids Day, the ‘Parliamentarians for the 2030 Agenda’ invited UNAIDS Brussels Representative Dr. Jantine Jacobi, Burundian youth representative Fabien Ndikuriyo, Stéphanie Drèze of MSF and Dr. Gert Scheerder of Sensoa to discuss the HIV epidemic worldwide, in Belgium and in Belgium’s partner countries.

Belgium in UNAIDS Governance Board

18/2/2019

HIV mural in Antwerp. Copyright: Sensoa

This year Belgium will preside the UNAIDS constituency with Portugal, Luxemburg and the Netherlands in the Programme Coordination Board (PCB) of UNAIDS, the governing board of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV. The UNAIDS PCB sets the overall policies and priorities for UNAIDS and decides on the organisation’s planning and execution. Challenges discussed within the board include how to keep up international support for HIV response, but can also include discussions on the impact of big donor countries’ policies on the HIV/AIDS response, think of the detrimental effect of the reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy (or Global Gag Rule) by the US on integrated SRHR-HIV service delivery in countries in the Global South.

Intensified HIV testing and treatment efforts are reaching more people than ever but persistent barriers remain

29/11/2018

75% of all people living with HIV know their HIV status, but increased efforts are needed to reach the 9.4 million people living with HIV who are not aware that they are living with the virus, UNAIDS 2018 reports shows.

The good news and the bad news on the HIV-AIDS epidemic

10/9/2018

On 26 July 2018, UNAIDS published the latest statistics on the global HIV epidemic. In 2017, an estimated 36.9 million people were living with HIV. 21 million people have access to treatment, a record high. Consequently, the number of AIDS related deaths has dropped, to 940,000 in 2017. The biggest successes lay in Eastern and South-Eastern Africa, with a 42% decline in the number of AIDS related deaths since 2010. They reflect the successful scale-up of treatment in the region. Access to treatment also improved in most other regions, although (much) more modestly.

AIDS 2018: Takeaways from the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam

8/8/2018

More than 16,000 researchers, advocates, policy makers, funders and community leaders from more than 160 countries came together in Amsterdam for the 22nd International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2018). They are all committed to achieving a world free from HIV. These are the main takeaways:

<<Previous