People, Partnerships and Innovation Are Key to Ending the HIV Epidemic | IAS 2025

Ending the HIV epidemic requires placing people, partnerships and innovation at the center of the strategy, according to global health leaders and advocates who spoke during a session at the International AIDS Society meeting in Kigali, Rwanda.

Globally, about 40 million people live with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Although there is no cure for HIV, access to drugs that treat it and prevention efforts have cut the number of deaths from the disease by half, according to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The Global Fund estimates that the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria has been cut by 61%, saving about 65 million by 2023.

Throughout the session, which was sponsored by Viiv Healthcare, speakers returned to a central theme: the three pillars — people, partnerships, and innovation — are not in competition but are interdependent and necessary for ending HIV.

Vuyiseka Dubula

“We can’t end the HIV epidemic without people at the center, partnerships around them, and innovations that serve them,” Vuyiseka Dubula, who is head of the Community, Rights & Gender Department at the Global Fund, said during the session. She detailed how grassroots organizing catalyzed the creation of the Global Fund in 2002. It raises and pools resources from multiple donors and invests more than $5 billion per year in more than 100 low- and middle-income countries.

“Partnerships are a show of strength of community,” she said. “When a community comes together, they show that solidarity. They also show power and that we can drive change. People who are organizing in their communities tap into each other’s neighbors and form a community. The Global Fund became a community 20 years ago, where we asked communities, the private sector, government, philanthropists and donors to come together to form a partnership.”

But Dubula challenged the audiences to think about shifting partnerships that may jeopardize the work already done by the Global Fund. Although she did not specifically mention the role of the United States, she called out the threats to partnerships such as the Global Fund or GAVI, the Global Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), that advance global health.

The U.S. government was instrumental in the creation of the Global Fund and is its largest donor, accounting for 33% of its funding. It also plays a significant role in governance and oversight of the Global Fund.

Related: Trump Administration Throws U.S. AIDS Support into Turmoil

U.S. funding for the Global Fund is authorized through the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and several provisions that applied to the Global Fund expired in March. The United States will pull back $7.1 billion in PEPFAR funds as part of the Trump administration’s ending of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). An executive order also calls for review of all U.S. participation in international organization.

“Every year, the fragility of the community systems is under threat in this new partnership, and those are the things we need to challenge ourselves,” Dubula said during the IAS session. “How are we going to do things differently as we are being challenged, and all of what we have done now is at risk? What are we going to do differently in evolving the Global Fund partnership with many other partnerships?”

Analysts with KFF have said it’s important to watch the administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget, which includes reductions in funding for global health. Although the Global Fund is not specifically named, the budget request asks for matching global contributions to be at $4 for every $1 the United States contributes. Currently the ratio is $2 for every $1 the United States contributes for global health.

Patient-centered innovation

Doreen Moraa Moracha

During the IAS session, Doreen Moraa Moracha, an HIV activist born with the virus, argued for putting people living with HIV at the heart of the global response. “People are not just numbers,” she said. “They are the HIV response.”

Moracha is an influencer with a YouTube channel called “I am a Beautiful Story,” which she started in 2019 to share her lived experiences as a younger person diagnosed with HIV as a way to educate and break the stigma surrounding HIV.

She said that when she was diagnosed at the age of 13, HIV was a death sentence. “Now it’s not because the people pushed for treatment; they pushed for better treatment. They pushed for better innovations. And now we have long-acting—now we have long-acting treatments.”

During the session, Moracha stressed that meaningful change stems from empowering those directly affected, not simply offering them token inclusion. She also highlighted the persistent stigma and discrimination people with HIV face.

“We have systemic exclusion from leadership roles, because sometimes we are seen just as an HIV diagnosis, and we are not seen beyond our pills and our diagnosis,” Moracha said. But “many beautiful community-led approaches have actually improved care and prevention.”

One such effort is the U=U (Undetectable = Untransmittable), launched in 2016 by the Prevention Access Campaign (PAC), a community-led global health and human rights effort. The U=U campaign launched to educate providers, public health officials and communities around the world that a viral load between 200 and 1,000 copies/mL has almost zero or negligible risk of sexual transmission, according to the World Health Organization.

Elizabeth Bukusi, Ph.D., M.Ph.

The final speaker during the IAS session spoke about being optimistic about the power of innovation and people that can lead to meaningful change. Elizabeth Bukusi, Ph.D., M.Ph., senior principal of clinical research scientist at Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), argued that HIV prevention and treatment solutions must accommodate diverse needs. “Innovation,” she said, “means designing products that fit people’s lives — not the other way around.”

Bukusi, who is also a professor at the University of Washington in the departments of obstetrics and gynecology, advocated for multipurpose prevention technologies that combine contraception, sexually transmitted infection protection, and HIV prevention in discreet, user-friendly formats.

She summed up the session, saying that strong partnerships are needed with people-centered approaches to innovation. “How do we integrate that with innovation to really accelerate progress towards ending the HIV epidemic?” Bukusi asked. “We cannot stop innovating until we have enough options, and we cannot have enough options until we know what people need.”