The Vice President said the ALL-IN Initiative also aims to take urgent action for adolescents aged 10-19 years. “Evidently, this is the cohort where HIV related deaths are not declining,” he said, adding that “it is often reported that the reason HIV infection is on the increase amongst the youth, particularly young women, is due to structural influences such as extreme poverty, gender violence, low education and lack of access to services. 

However, what has been lacking is the evidence to support these reports,” he said. Mr Masisi said this has prompted the government to commence trial of structural interventions to establish their impact on HIV infection. He noted that that was the reason an  inter-ministerial national structural intervention trial, commonly referred to as INSTRUCT, was commissioned two years ago.

He said the trial to test the impact of a combined package of structural and behavioural interventions focused on young women aged between 15-29 years.

He added that the trial would be a good reference point in designing and focusing prevention efforts to fight HIV amongst young women. “Winning against HIV/AIDS is rather ambitious but achievable,” said Mr Masisi. 

He said with combined efforts and research to generate new information on how best to tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic, close monitoring to channel resources to where they were needed most, continued evaluation of programmes and strategies in order to know where to scale or otherwise, ending AIDS by 2030 was possible. Ends