On behalf of the NGO Delegation to the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board, we share our collective response to the draft outline of the Global AIDS Strategy 2026-2031 and the process to date.
This Strategy is being developed at a time when people living with HIV and key and vulnerable populations face profound challenges, first and foremost a deepening funding crisis, requiring immediate steps to safeguard lifesaving services, and ambitious action to ensure sustainable HIV responses for the long term. This is also an era of shrinking civic space and rising political resistance to human rights and gender equality, with direct impacts on people living with and affected by HIV, and an erosion of public trust driven by disinformation. These pressures threaten hard-won progress over the past decades to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Yet, this is also a time when communities continue to demonstrate unwavering leadership, resilience, and collaboration in the HIV response.
We welcome the Strategy outline’s focus on the three overarching priorities of sustainability, equity, and community leadership. However, these principles must be matched by greater clarity, ambition, concrete actions, and strong accountability to ensure a response that reflects the urgency of the crises currently facing people living with and affected by HIV.
Sustainability
The Strategy presents fuller domestic financing and multisectoral integration as key components of sustainability. However, it does not provide adequate detail on how they will be achieved, especially in environments where political will to fund key population-friendly services and community systems is low.
- The Strategy must strongly emphasize that true sustainability will depend on governments taking increased responsibility for financing all aspects of the HIV response, including youth- and key population-friendly services, often best delivered through community-led responses.
- The Strategy must include clear and actionable commitments from member states and co-sponsors to establish and expand financing mechanisms that provide direct, predictable, and long-term support to community-led organizations. These mechanisms must be transparent, accountable, and co-designed with civil society to ensure they respond to actual needs at community level. It is important that these financing mechanisms prioritize not only service delivery but also the full spectrum of community-led programming, prevention initiatives, and community-led monitoring efforts, recognizing that much of the limited funding that remains during this period of financial crisis is channeled almost exclusively toward life-saving treatment services, while prevention, advocacy, monitoring and community systems are left severely underfunded and unsupported. There must also be explicit accountability mechanisms to track community-led financing commitments at national level.
- Communities are also keen to see more effective integration and linkage between HIV and other health sectors, for example, leading to more people-centred and efficient services. They also made it clear that the response to HIV cannot be separated from the systems that shape people’s lives. We also urge the Strategy to go further in defining how integration with other systems, such as education, employment, housing, climate resilience, humanitarian response and economic justice for key populations, adolescent girls and young women, as well as young people, will take place. These directly shape the conditions in which people live and their ability to access care. The Strategy must offer concrete steps to support integration across sectors where HIV vulnerability is created and reinforced.
Stigma and discrimination, human rights and gender equality
We recognize the rationale for proposals to recommit to existing targets on stigma and discrimination, human rights and gender equality. However we also assert that there have been longstanding gaps in these areas, that demand urgent action and a true recommitment to human rights and gender equality as non-negotiable aspects of an effective HIV response. We also warn that the use of less precise and more subjective language, such as dignity in place of rights, risks weakening hard-won gains and would not be acceptable to our delegation.
- In a context of restricted funding, there is a danger that rights-based interventions are deprioritised. There is a strong and consistent demand that the Strategy reaffirm and expand its commitments to human rights, gender equality and gender transformative approaches – and that this Strategy be the one that finally addresses these issues on an equal footing with other areas, recognising that countries cannot afford to keep putting obstacles in the way of success. They were equally clear that any retreat from these commitments would compromise the credibility and impact of the Strategy at a time when they are most needed.
- Legal barriers continue to push people out of reach of care, especially laws that criminalize people for who they are or how they live. The next Strategy must speak clearly about the need to remove punitive laws and also support community-led legal literacy and empowerment programs, as well as engagement with human rights mechanisms such as the Human Rights Council, Universal Periodic Review, CEDAW, and regional courts. It must also outline the roles of donors, UN agencies, and technical partners in supporting the people working for legal change at local level, including community paralegals, legal advocates, and groups that report rights violations.
- The new Strategy must move beyond individual behavior change to address systemic inequalities, including those based on gender, age, disability, and intersecting forms of discrimination. Inequality based on gender continues to shape who gets care and who does not. Many interventions fail to address the social and economic systems that create risk in the first place and restrict autonomy and access to care, will not change the conditions that make people vulnerable. The next phase of this work must be long-term responses that support safety, dignity, and power for all people, especially those who are most often pushed to the margins.
- Our NGO report presented at the 55th PCB highlighted a rise in anti-rights and anti-gender mobilisation and misinformation. These challenges are a significant obstacle ending AIDS, and must be directly addressed in the new Strategy. At its 55th Meeting, the PCB agreed a collective commitment to more effective collaboration among co-sponsors, communities and member states to increase support for human rights and advance gender equality. For the NGO Delegation, addressing anti-rights movements must be at the forefront of UNAIDS’ mandate and the new strategy. Key actions include powerful new narratives to tackle disinformation, and investment in movement building across different sectors and with media, influencers and faith institutions. They must also include clarity on how UNAIDS and cosponsors will respond to organized backlash within global HIV spaces, including internal protections for inclusive language on gender equality, human rights, key populations, SRHR, and trans and nonbinary people.
- We welcome the recognition that addressing inequalities and ensuring fair access to medicines and innovations is essential to the success of the Strategy. However, we note with concern the removal of a standalone results area focused on gender equality and the rights and health of women and girls, including transgender women, as this risks diminishing the visibility and prioritization of gender within the overall response. We also assert that to be fully effective, clear actions on human rights and gender equality must be included across all three pillars of the Strategy.
Community leadership
The Strategy must directly address the financial fragility of community-led responses, often underpinned by a much deeper exclusion. Community organizations play an essential role in the delivery and integration of HIV services for key populations, and in prevention, advocacy, rights, legal empowerment, monitoring and accountability. Yet as described above, they remain underfunded and, in many cases, excluded from national planning and budgeting processes.
- The shift toward national leadership and domestic funding for community-led responses requires a total shift in approach, so that the meaningful engagement of communities and civil society is institutionalized in all aspects of the HIV response. UNAIDS has an essential role to play in this by working closely with governments and communities to strengthen capacity, build trust, and establish financing models that ensure domestic resources are allocated in a way that meaningfully supports and sustains communities’ contributions. Safeguards are also needed to protect community-led and civil society organizations from political interference, civic space restrictions, and shifting national priorities.
- Data systems need to be improved so that the work and impact of communities is documented, respected, and resourced. Many efforts led by civil society go unrecognized because the tools used to measure success were not designed to include them. The next Strategy should promote disaggregated, rights-based data systems that serve both accountability and safety. At the same time, it should protect the rights of individuals whose health information is being collected, especially in digital systems where privacy and safety are not always guaranteed.
Throughout the consultations, communities showed that we are ready to lead and committed to contributing to the success of the next Global AIDS Strategy, ensuring that it becomes a powerful and actionable roadmap for change. The HIV response will succeed only if communities are at its heart in both word and action.
At the 55th PCB meeting, we pushed for decision point 4.3d, which called for the meaningful involvement of communities, people living with, affected by, or most at risk of HIV, in the development of the Global AIDS Strategy. While recent consultations drew in substantial participation from communities and civil society, many community participants felt that the initial rounds of consultation did not allow for sufficient exchange or interactive discussion. We urge that subsequent processes center the voices of communities not just as contributors, but as more must be done to position them as co-creators of the Strategy.
Alignment with the High-Level Panel’s recommendations is also essential. The Strategy must include mechanisms to support implementation at country level and establish clear expectations for follow-through. Commitments made must be backed by accountability structures that do not rely solely on voluntary compliance.
The NGO Delegation wants UNAIDS to remain strong, resourced, and able to uphold its mandate to protect rights, sustain progress, and secure the civic space in which communities operate. Political pressures must not weaken this foundation.
The Global AIDS Strategy 2026-2031 must match today’s urgency with clarity, ambition, and a firm commitment to the communities who continue to drive the HIV response towards success – and who will pay the highest price if it fails. We stand ready to lead and expect the Strategy to stand with us.