HIV and AIDS

Since the creation of the Global Fund over 20 years ago, our partnership has achieved what was once considered impossible. Efforts by communities, governments, civil society, the private sector and global health partners have resulted in extraordinary progress in the fight against HIV. Globally, new HIV infections have declined by 39%, from 2.1 million in 2010 to 1.3 million in 2023¹.

However, key populations and vulnerable groups, especially children and adolescent girls and young women, are still being left behind. In 2023, only 57% of the children infected with HIV globally were getting the lifesaving treatment they need, compared with 77% of adults; this meant that 602,000 children living with HIV were not receiving antiretroviral therapy, contributing to 76,000 deaths.

Adolescent girls and young women (aged 15-24 years) are still at high risk of HIV in East and Southern Africa. Despite improvements over the past decade, they are more than twice as likely to acquire HIV as adolescent boys and young men. In 2023, adolescent girls and young women accounted for 17% of new infections globally. In regions outside of sub-Saharan Africa, over 73% of new infections in 2023 occurred among men and boys.

Together with PEPFAR and other partners, we are making significant progress toward reaching WHO’s “treat all” guidance and the UNAIDS “95-95-95” targets. Those efforts have significantly increased the number of people living with HIV who know their HIV status, the number of people who know their status on antiretroviral therapy and the number of people on antiretroviral therapy who have a suppressed viral load (when the amount of HIV in a person’s blood becomes so low that it is undetectable and untransmissible).

In 2023, 25 million people were on antiretroviral therapy for HIV in countries where the Global Fund invests. This is up from 17.5 million people in 2017, but still far from the UNAIDS 95–95–95 target of 34 million people for 2025.

We also support multimonth (three months or more of medicine or prevention products at a time) and community dispensing of HIV prevention, care and treatment products, as well as community programs for antiretroviral therapy delivery, adherence support, community leadership, engagement and treatment literacy.

The Global Fund has steadily increased investments in HIV prevention, from US$705 million over the 2018-2020 period to more than US$870 million over the 2021-2023 period.

We are also investing more in high-impact HIV prevention interventions such as condoms and lubricants, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), and harm reduction programs for people who inject drugs.

As well as these investments, we support countries to focus their efforts on locations with high HIV transmission and on people with the greatest HIV prevention needs – key populations and adolescent girls and young women, and their male sexual partners – so they have the tools, knowledge and power to prevent themselves from acquiring HIV.

We also work with partners to make HIV prevention options more accessible in the spaces where people need rapid access to them. By investing in community-led monitoring, we support communities affected by HIV to monitor the accessibility, quality, acceptability and affordability of health services, so that these services are integrated and centered around the people who use them.