Start Free Stay Free AIDS Free: 2019 report

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) launched the Start Free Stay Free AIDS Free framework in 2016 to build on the achievements of the Global Plan towards the Elimination of New HIV Infections among Children by 2015 and Keeping their Mothers Alive, which ended in 2014.

The Start Free Stay Free AIDS Free framework promotes a set of human rights-based interventions to end AIDS as a public health threat among children and adolescents. It focuses on enhancing actions in 23 countries with high numbers of children, adolescents and young women living with HIV.

In 2018 these focus countries together accounted for, globally, 86% of pregnant women living with HIV; 80% of children aged 0–14 years acquiring HIV; 85% of adolescent girls and young women aged 10–24 years acquiring HIV; and 85% of children and adolescents aged 0–19 years living with HIV.

The framework uses a lifecycle approach, with its three main components supporting each other:

• Start Free aims to end new HIV infections among children by, among other actions, reaching 95% of pregnant women living with HIV and sustaining them on lifelong antiretroviral therapy by 2018.
• Stay Free focuses on reducing the number of adolescent girls and young women aged 10-24 years acquiring HIV to fewer than 100 000 annually by 2020.
• AIDS Free seeks to ensure that 95% of all children and adolescents aged 10-19 years living with HIV receive antiretroviral therapy by 2020.