Countries in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) have made remarkable progress in scaling up treatment for pregnant women living with HIV and reducing new infections among children. Estimates from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS indicate that 93 per cent of pregnant women living with HIV in ESA received antiretroviral medicines in 2017. Thanks to an accelerated response over the years in this region, the number of children who acquired HIV has been reduced by more than 1.2 million since 2009. This represents 80 per cent of the global reduction in new infections among children during that period.

However, one of the key challenges remaining to eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV is the retention of mothers and infants in care through the end of breastfeeding. Mothers and their infants in this region continue to face significant challenges as they navigate the health care system over extended periods of time.

This important review examines the bottlenecks to retention in care of mother-infant pairs and makes recommendations based on evidence-based practices to reduce those barriers.

Click here to read the full review

"Every year, an estimated 15 million girls aged under 18 are married worldwide with little or no say in the matter." Child marriage as a social construct, ruptures childhood and exposes young married girls to early sexuality, pregnancy and childbearing, and has severe health and social consequences generally denying girls their rights.

This research VSO investigated the extent and factors that cause child marriages in three countries: Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The research explores the impact of child marriage, the causes of child marriage, the legal framework age of marriage and the countries responses to reduce child marriage.

Key recommendations include:

The developing and implementing of national action plans to end child marriage
Empowering girls to mitigate against child marriage
Community mobilization against child marriage
Provision of services to mitigate against child marriage
Advocacy for countries to address the problem of child marriage
Enabling legal and policy environment

Click here to download the full research.

Evidence-based practices for retention in care of mother-infant pairs in the context of eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Eastern and Southern Africa

Preliminary Research Into the Extent, Factors and Effects of Child Marriage.