As the work of High-Level Week at the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly continued in New York, the delegation of my H.E. Toyin Saraki Global Policy and Philanthropy Office and the Wellbeing  Foundation Africa spoke at The Science Exists. Why Is Delivery Still Failing? Closing the Gap for Mothers, Children and Adolescents, the private breakfast roundtable convened by Foreign Policy in partnership with ViiV Healthcare and held under the Chatham House Rule, sharing the Foundation’s frontline experience of health delivery in Nigeria.

The question posed in the title is precisely the one I carry as Co-Chair of the Africa REACH Leadership Council, where our purpose is to see a proven scientific and clinical protocol for the prevention of vertical transmission translated into routine service delivery reaching every mother, infant and adolescent on our continent.

Some 120,000 children acquired HIV through vertical transmission in the most recent year counted, and while 79% of adults living with HIV receive antiretroviral therapy, only 55% of children do, a disparity in coverage that has widened rather than closed. Nigeria remains among the countries carrying the largest numbers of children newly acquiring HIV, which places a particular duty upon all of us who work alongside our health system.

The means of prevention have been established for years, so the deficit lies in implementation, in antenatal services not reached, in testing not offered, in treatment not continued through the postpartum and breastfeeding period, and in paediatric formulations that do not arrive. Through MamaCare360 and the midwives of my Wellbeing  Foundation Africa, we work precisely where those gaps open, in the antenatal and postnatal contact at which a mother and her infant can be tested, treated and retained in care.

As financing contracts, governments, industry and donors must protect the integration of HIV services within routine antenatal, newborn and adolescent care, so that no child begins life with an infection the world has long known how to prevent.

 

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