Community-led monitoring is increasingly recognized as a necessary component of a sustainable HIV response because communities are able to gather essential information about gaps and barriers, especially for those who have been most excluded or marginalized. There is a rich history of monitoring led by communities living with and affected by HIV. In this session, participants will engage with leaders from community organizations conducting different types of community-led monitoring, including of stock-outs, procurement, budgets, stigma and discrimination, and specific barriers faced by key populations.

This session will focus on methods and approaches to maximize the efficiency and impact of country-level and global HIV responses. It will explore ways to inform budget allocation decisions for HIV prevention and treatment.

This session will explore the experiences of migrants and HIV services. It will also analyse the evidence around the exclusion of migrants and internally displaced people from HIV programming.

This session will delve into the policing of gender and sexual diversity and its connections to HIV programming and services. The session will bring attention to the detriments of criminal provisions on marginalized communities. Criminalization of non-normative positions (identities, expressions and choices about individuals’ bodies) continues to make already marginalized communities more vulnerable to further exclusion from HIV, sexual reproductive health and other health-related services.

This session aims to amplify the voices and expertise of youth from diverse geographic and demographic backgrounds, including leaders, researchers and advocates in the HIV/AIDS response. This is an exciting opportunity for young stakeholders to present and address key questions and challenges based on their personal and professional experiences, including policy and societal barriers that further exacerbate the impact of HIV/AIDS on their communities. It will span across hearing from youth on their insights and perspectives, to leveraging youth to design and lead programmes, to hearing directly from the beneficiaries of youth programming.

As we accelerate our efforts towards elimination of HIV transmission over the next decade, the PANGEA-HIV 2 consortium of partners propose a special session to deepen our understanding of how phylogenetics can be used to describe and predict the course of a declining epidemic, help interpret trial results, improve estimates of incidence, monitor drug resistance and provide evidence to improve interventions. The session will explore the use of phylogenetics to understand the spread of acquired and transmitted drug resistance and highlight the importance of developing alternative monitoring strategies in the absence of regular viral load testing.

Mental health is routinely included on lists of neglected issues in the care of people living with HIV. This session will be an opportunity for global mental health and HIV experts to interact and engage with each other and the audience to understand the scope and magnitude of the problem of mental health and HIV, and consider solutions to integrating their care.

Adolescents and young adults are often highlighted as the groups facing the greatest challenges living with HIV and the poorest treatment outcomes. They represent a combination of those who have grown up with HIV, and those who have acquired HIV as young people - often as members of young key populations. If they are successfully linked to and retained in care, they will eventually be the people who live the longest with HIV and take ART the longest. Solutions to improving engagement in care, adherence, and retention need to come from young people themselves if we are to have any chance of ensuring youth thrive.

This session will present data on the benefits of the intersection between sexual pleasure, rights and health as part of a sex-positive approach. It will illustrate how this improves sexual and reproductive health and well-being, including HIV clinical practice and increases acceptance of sexual rights and sexual pleasure within the broader community.

Numerous cities, regions and countries around the world have made impressive progress on HIV incidence and mortality. How did they do it? And how can their progress inform advocacy, programming and policy globally? In July 2019 amfAR, AVAC and Friends of the Global Fight, in partnership with Kaiser Family Foundation, released a report examining six jurisdictions, identifying factors that drove their progress and suggesting the common elements of success. It also provided a timeline of the future, based on those elements, to suggest priorities for accelerating global efforts against the epidemic. This session will offer insights from advocates and researchers in these jurisdictions and will engage the audience in a dialogue about how lessons from successful jurisdictions can help drive effective advocacy and policy.

The session aims at highlighting the added burden in national HIV responses caused by mass migration and brainstorm on solution. It will showcase the experiences and challenges of migrant key populations and possible mitigation actions and improve understanding on the complexities of indigenous people facing migration, displacement and specific needs. It will then highlight the multiple challenges transgender migrants face in the United States.

This session will focus on HIV advocacy, its history, evolution and current challenges. Advocacy happens when a group of people unite and take action in response to disparity and inequity. HIV advocacy has a history of powerful effectiveness because it was a grassroots-driven response to a crisis.