The Joint Programme continued to strengthen community-led HIV responses in 2025, advancing meaningful community engagement and leadership to ensure that communities are empowered to address the specific needs of people living with and affected by HIV. The Joint Programme’s support focused on sustaining regional coordination and rights-based advocacy, expanding community-led service delivery models in different settings and scaling up of evidence generation and communication initiatives to advance inclusive, stigma-free HIV services.
The UNAIDS Secretariat developed annexes to the HIV Response Sustainability Roadmap Part B: Companion guide, in consultation with community and civil society partners, which complemented guidance on sustainability and transition planning with rights-based, gender-transformative and community-led approaches. UNDP also worked with partners to strengthen meaningful community participation in HIV governance and financing, improving civil society and key population engagement in national dialogue platforms and Country Coordinating Mechanisms across multiple regions. The Power of Prevention initiative, launched in Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe, helped drive community-led advocacy for greater inclusion of HIV prevention for key populations in national policies and budgets.
Through Joint Programme support, community-led monitoring was advanced as a driver for strengthening national programme review processes, including through the introduction of a self-assessment tool, support for costing of community-led monitoring and documentation of its integration opportunities and avenues at country level. In Ukraine, community-led monitoring data was formally integrated into the work of the National TB and HIV/AIDS Council following UNDP and Secretariat support, to mobilize community leadership to gather data, define priorities such as community participation in governance, sustainable public financing, and inform legal and policy reforms. In Namibia, UN Women built community capacity to track availability of essential services such as ART provision, integrated HIV and gender-based violence services and family planning commodities across 109 facilities. In Latin America and the Caribbean, regional and national consultations engaged more than 90 organizations from over 25 countries to identify structural barriers to community systems integration.
Community-led service delivery approaches gained strength with Joint Programme support in 2025, improving outreach to underserved key populations with HIV, sexual and reproductive health, mental health and gender-based violence services. The UNAIDS Secretariat and partners provided support to 66 LGBTQI+-led organizations in 32 countries, resulting in strengthened capacities for human rights-focused community-led monitoring, and legal support and gender-based violence survivor assistance in 11 countries. Emergency support funds were also delivered to 43 LGBTQI+ groups facing human rights crises in the context of HIV.
UNFPA, UNICEF and UNODC further reinforced community-led approaches across regions, including through adolescent-responsive and sexual and reproductive health programming in eastern and southern Africa to integrate HIV prevention and testing which reached millions; harm reduction outreach in Indonesia and Kenya; capacity building of community-based organizations in Afghanistan; and gender-responsive case management in Kyrgyzstan's women's prisons. UN Women provided support to communities of women and girls living with or affected by HIV in 22 countries. Support provided included the training of commune councillors and village leaders in Cambodia on feminism, positive masculinity and women's rights to better deliver gender-responsive support to women living with HIV. Furthermore, UNICEF helped to strengthen data-driven strategies that prioritized adolescent girls and young women, ensuring that communities were empowered to lead advocacy and social accountability efforts, implement anti-discrimination campaigns and shift harmful social and gender norms.
