What we do

Children and HIV and AIDS

A monk in LAO PDR is teaching students about HIV/AIDS.

The Global Campaign Four Ps

The Global Campaign on Children and AIDS places children and young people at the heart of the HIV and AIDS responses. The campaign's four components are known as the four Ps:

• Preventing new infections among children and young people by expanding key interventions to avert and reduce risk behaviours and vulnerabilities associated with HIV; working with partners, UNICEF will help develop and implement strategies for advocacy, policies and interventions that increase adolescents’ access to targeted HIV-prevention information services, key risk-reduction skills and services.

• Preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV to reduce the number of children born with HIV and to improve the health of mothers and children living with HIV; a major focus of the campaign will be to accelerate the mother-to-child plus programme.

• Providing paediatric treatment through a significant increase of antiretroviral therapies for infected children (currently less than 1 per cent of those who need it receive treatment). Getting more HIV-positive children onto treatment is a major element of the campaign.

Another major element is keeping parents alive to prevent orphaning, through accelerated access to family treatment.

By expanding the availability and use of drugs such as cotrimoxizole, the mortality of AIDS-affected children can be dramatically reduced by an estimated 250,000 children per year. The drug is cheap, widely available and health workers have extensive experience using it for pneumonia and malaria throughout the developing world.

• Protection, care and support of orphans and children affected by HIV and AIDS through the global endorsement and enactment of the strategies outlined in the Framework for the Protection, Care and Support of Orphans and Vulnerable Children. One key strategy is education. Putting children into school and keeping them there, including girls and the increasing numbers of orphans, provides a normalcy that many children lack and provides a means of emotional and social support. In addition, education clearly has prevention benefits too, especially for girls. However, because of school fees and other barriers, more and more children stay out of school. Another major public policy/advocacy dimension of the global campaign is to move the abolition of school fees agenda forward.