Prevention Coalition Meeting

The Ghana AIDS Commission in partnership with the UNAIDS organized the Prevention Coalition meeting on April 14, 2022. Thanking participants for their attendance, Dr Kyeremeh Atuahene, the Director-General of the Ghana AIDS Commission, alluded to the fact that the number of people present was a testament to the effort and desire to control the HIV epidemic through prevention interventions. He said the 2016 United Nations Political Declaration on Ending AIDS, committed Member States and partners to end HIV as a public health threat by 2030. This gave birth to the Global HIV Prevention Coalition which aims at galvanizing national and international commitment to support national HIV prevention programmes in 28 focus countries that had high burdens and high incidence of HIV to achieve the ambitious global prevention targets.

Following the GPC commitment, Ghana established the National HIV Prevention Coalition in 2017 under the leadership of GAC and identified prevention champions who undertook prevention self-assessment and presented bottlenecks impeding the slow progress of the national response. With this background, UNAIDS and GAC established the Ghana HIV Prevention Acceleration Team to strengthen programme implementation and complement efforts with a global good practice tailored to the country's context combination HIV prevention interventions.

The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the HIV prevention scorecard and technical assistance support for the 2021 -2025 prevention roadmap with 10 points of action. Furthermore, to discuss the social contracting plan to support the HIV intervention and how best to support Civil Society Organizations.

Mrs Angela Trenton-Mbonde, the Country of UNAIDS thanked participants for their attendance to revitalize the National Prevention Coalition. She stressed that treatment as prevention is formidable, however, primary prevention interventions will be key as Ghana forges ahead with an intensified effort in the direction of combination HIV prevention intervention programme implementation.

Dr Fred Nana Poku presented the overview of the National HIV Prevention Coalition Term of Reference (ToR). The prevention covered: the purpose of the prevention coalition; the composition of the coalition; the roles and responsibilities of the coalition; accountability and institutions to chair and co-chair the coalition.

Dr Fred Nana Poku also provided an overview of the Global Prevention Coalition Roadmap 2020 and Ghana’s progress on the 10-point actions of the roadmap 2017- 2020 as well as the remaining challenges that require urgent attention. He also presented 2025 roadmap action points that provide guidance to NPC and how the coordinating agency (GAC) will ensure implementation.
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The meeting was an important milestone towards better-organized responses to combination HIV interventions.