Lead image for Put communities at centre of HIV response in Africa.
The future of HIV response depends on more than funding medicines and technologies. As governments take greater ownership of HIV programmes, they must also sustain a community centred approaches that have underpinned progress over the last four decades.
As the global HIV community gathers in Rio de Janeiro for the 2026 International AIDS Conference under the theme Rethink. Rebuild. Rise, we find ourselves at a defining moment.
Like never before, science has produced innovative HIV prevention tools with the potential to cut new HIV infections. Emergence of long-acting HIV prevention technologies, including long-acting injectable PrEP, marks another major milestone in the fight against the virus.
Yet new technologies only achieve public health impact when people trust them, can access them and choose to use them.
Kenya's rollout of oral PrEP in 2017 offers an important example. Awareness and curiosity were initially high, but sustaining uptake proved more challenging. It became clear that making prevention technology available was not enough as people also needed to trust and understand it before feeling more confident using it.
As a technical partner supporting the Ministry of Health and NASCOP in introducing and scaling up oral PrEP, Lvcthealth helped generate evidence that shaped Kenya's national rollout. During the IPCP oral PrEP demonstration project among adolescent girls and young women and female sex workers, continuation on oral PrEP declined from nearly 100 percent at initiation to about 30 percent within three months.
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Working with communities to understand why people were discontinuing oral PrEP, we found that the barriers had little to do with the medicine itself.