Youth advocates, your toolkit is here.
As we know, policy makers use evidence to determine what they do. However, there is still a lack of evidence about preventing HIV in young people in developing countries.
But today, the UNAIDS Inter-agency taskforce on young people launched the manual, “Preventing HIV/AIDS in young people, a systematic review of the evidence from developing countries”.
The first study of its kind, it analyzes evidence from 80 cases, and classifies them in three categories: -Go! –Ready –Steady. Now young people can take these UNAIDS policy ratings to their governments and say, this is a ‘ready’ project, we should scale it up, or say this is ‘steady’ and must be remedied to be more effective.
The manual was written to fulfill obligations set by countries in the 2001 UNGASS Declaration of Commitment, where governments agreed that 95% of young people should know how to prevent HIV by 2010. Unfortunately we are still no where near meeting those targets.
David Ross, the researcher presenting the manual, stressed that HIV prevalence rates are often used in statistics to illustrate national HIV situations. However, HIV incidence rates are the most important to look at because ‘incidence,’ or when the virus is contracted, happens the majority of the time when people are in their teens.
“Youth are most neglected part of the pandemic”, said Stephen Lewis, UN Envoy on AIDS in Africa, known for his outspoken leadership.
Though he welcomed the UNAIDS study, Lewis was quick to point out that it does not effectively analyze the most at-risk youth. Because its survey sample only includes youth in school, there is no analysis about programs that reach out-of school youth, who are the most at-risk. Lewis emphasized the devastating lack of evidence about how to work with these groups, often made vulnerable because they may of lost a parents to AIDS, and called for more research and action to reach these populations.
