News and events

A special issue on "Strengthening Families on Aids Care" will be launched at the open night of the Aids Impact Conference. A cocktail event will be held on 22 September 2009 and we hope that many LG1 authors will join us.

The Coalition on Children Affected by AIDS (of which the HSRC is a member) has congratulated Dr Eric Goosby on his nomination to lead PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and at the same time issued a call to increase the focus on children and families in the global AIDS fight.

The release of the JLICA final report in London on 14 February 2009 drew global media attention. The accompanying document is a summary of some of the media coverage received in the days following the launch.

The prestigious journal The Lancet, published an editorial titled A new agenda for children affected by HIV/AIDS in its 14 February 2009 issue. The article is about the JLICA final report.

International efforts to help children affected by HIV/ Aids have failed to support the very structure that helps them the most: their families.

The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS, a two-year, independent alliance of researchers, implementers, policy-makers, activists and people living with HIV, has released its' final report "Home Truths: Facing the Facts on Children, AIDS, and Poverty".

"The Case for Cash Transfers," presentation delivered at the symposium satellite session, Towards Social Protection: Building effective and sustainable national responses to meeting the HIV Crisis. Organised by Unicef, GTZ, JLICA, RIATT/CABA-WCAR-ILO, at the 15th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA), Dakar, Senegal, Dec. 6, 2008.

The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS (JLICA) Learning Group 1: Strengthening Families has posted the papers commissioned to investigate, and make recommendations for actions, on key issues. These papers, as well as the Integrated Report are available for download.

The JLICA held an International Symposium on Meeting the Needs of Children Affected by HIV/AIDS on the 24 September 2007 at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. The meeting was attended by more than 250 participants, many of whom were high-level international policy makers, scientists, researchers and funders. The goal of the one-day symposium was to engage participants in debate on key issues affecting children affected by HIV and AIDS.

Visit the symposium website at http://www.jlica.org/symposium.htm for information on the presentations and speakers.

The aim of this meeting is for programme implementers to share lessons learned in the scale-up of HIV/AIDS programmes with a focus on building local capacity, quality, coordination among partners and identification of barriers. JLICA Co-Chair, Agnes Binagwaho, will attend this meeting and present the following paper, “The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS: Sharing Knowledge for Action to Support Vulnerable Children”. More information about this meeting can be found at www.hivimplementers.com

The objective of this bi-regional conference is to establish an evidence-based South-South dialogue between policy/decision makers and researchers, with a view to informing policies on broad-based social protection while accelerating progress towards achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and of human development broadly speaking. The conference intends to engage policy makers in a reflection about the nature, feasibility and sustainability of an integrated approach to broad-based social protection, aimed at accelerating poverty reduction and promoting the achievement of the MDGs.
http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/sppr

The theme for the conference this year is “Building Consensus on Prevention, Treatment and Care.”
The 2007 AIDS conference aims to serve as a platform for deliberations on the key contentious issues relating to prevention, treatment and care. In particular, the conference will highlight state-of-the-art developments in prevention technologies; new approaches to prevention; the long-term impact of highly active antiretroviral therapy on incidence, prevalence, morbidity and mortality; the role of nutrition in HIV/AIDS; and the role of research into the use of complimentary and traditional medicines in HIV/AIDS.

The Inter Agency Task Team on Children and HIV and AIDS will meet in Washington, DC to reflect on its work during 2006, receive updates on the achievements from Regional IATTs as well as to hear from work done by and links with other initiatives for instance on advocacy and research, and other IATTs (on PMTCT and Paediatric AIDS). LG1 Co-Chair, Angela Wakhweya, will present to the IATT on the JLICA. Co-Chair Linda Richter as well as other JLICA members will attend this meeting.

The first meeting of the Learning Groups took place on the 7 and 8 March 2007, and the objective was to compare and discuss their groups’ respective research agendas so that possible gaps and overlaps could be identified and to define a mechanism for ensuring timely sharing of information between Learning Group members as well as between Learning Groups. On March 9 and 10, the Steering Committee assembled to discuss the JLICA’s work plan, measurable outcomes, advocacy strategy, and partnership building. The meeting was attended by 40 international participants including social and medical scientists from various research and academic institutions.

The JLICA was officially launched at the Foxhills Conference Facility, Surrey, in the United Kingdom on 10 October 2006. The launch was followed by an intense 2-day working meeting, attended by Steering Committee members, Learning Group Co-Chairs, representatives of the founding partner organisations as well as prospective donors. For more information on the launch visit www.jlica.org

This satellite session at the recent International AIDS Conference showcased a range of specialists in the HIV/AIDS field, who came together to support the move to ‘Evidence to Action’ for children’s wellbeing. The speakers included Stephen Lewis, United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, who opened the session. Speakers for the first panel, included Linda Richter, Geoff Foster, and Jim Kim all of whom highlighted implementation gaps in the delivery of essential children’s services and in support to families and communities in areas heavily burdened by HIV/AIDS. The second panel explored what forms of evidence are required to improve children’s outcomes and discussed how to accelerate translation of knowledge into policy. The presenters included Alex de Waal, Stuart Gillespie, and Paul Bekkers, the Dutch Government’s Ambassador for HIV/AIDS.