Targeting HIV Interventions for Adolescents
The Issue
The global HIV response has been impressive, and solid gains have been made. However, these gains are not balanced across regions and populations, and children and young people continue to fall behind. In 2017 alone, 590,000 young people between the ages of 15 to 24 were newly infected with HIV, of whom 250,000 were adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19. Girls accounted for two thirds of all new HIV infections among adolescents.
To break the cycle of new infections and deaths, adolescents must be tested for HIV and linked to treatment. Too few of those at risk and living with HIV have access to prevention and treatment programmes.
Why Does it Matter?
Article 6 and Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child state that all children have a right to life and to health. Furthermore, UNICEF and partners are committed to ending AIDS by 2030 in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs.) This will promote progress not only in the fight against HIV, but also across other SDGs such as gender equality, good health and well-being.
Twenty-five years into the HIV response, critical bottlenecks still limit the design and delivery of appropriate services to adolescents and young people at risk of HIV. 360,000 adolescents are projected to die of AIDS-related diseases between 2018 and 2030 without additional investment in HIV prevention, testing and treatment programs. As HIV affects people differently across cultures, genders, ages and locations, there is no consistent way to deliver treatment. Therefore careful planning of the appropriate approaches to prevention, care and treatments are essential.
In a fast-changing global digital landscape, with ever-increasing mobile and internet penetration across countries, adolescents and young people are digital natives. This presents an exceptional opportunity to design prevention and treatment programmes innovatively. New data and technology may help us better understand the combinations of behaviours and factors that put children and adolescents at risk. We can use this knowledge to effectively deliver services to the most at risk and vulnerable populations in this age group, reducing the risk of HIV infections.
Our Project
This project will address this issue by using a combination of innovative techniques to prioritise geographical areas for programming. By using advanced data science techniques to combine a number of data sources, we hope to provide a model that can help UNICEF reach the adolescents and young people most at risk, improving efficiency, equity and scale of HIV programmes.
This phase of the project aims to identify sub-national geographical areas that contain the largest adolescent population and the greatest clustering of adolescent specific risks and vulnerabilities. More accurate geographic prioritisation and periodic risk monitoring will be achieved through the use of novel analytic techniques, such as machine learning and small area estimates, to combine geo-tagged data sources.
The output of this phase will be a heat map that prioritises geographic areas and segments populations for programming purposes. This will mean that the user can see, at a more granular geographic level, population groups who potentially need urgent help and what type of help would be best suited – assisting the delivery of the right interventions to the right adolescents at the right time and on the right scale.
Our pilot project will take place in Côte d'Ivoire, where in 2018 an estimated 46,000 children and adolescents aged 0-19 were living with HIV. Our goal is to roll-out the methodology to other countries in the future, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness
Our Outputs
