What's New

In less than 10 years, the Together for Girls partnership has made monumental progress in achieving a safer world for every child, adolescent and young person. Read about the results and priorities.

The survey showed that nearly all health facilities in Bangladesh offer antenatal care for women and curative care for children. A majority of the facilities provide family planning and child vaccination services. Less common services are for non-communicable disease and tuberculosis diagnosis or treatment and normal delivery. The availability of normal delivery services has increased across all types of health facilities with the most notable change among Union Health and Family Welfare Centers (UHFWCs).

The new UNAIDS report, Health, rights and drugs: harm reduction, decriminalization and zero discrimination for people who use drugs, shows that of the 10.6 million people who inject drugs in 2016, more than half were living with hepatitis C and one in eight were living with HIV. It outlines that ensuring that comprehensive harm reduction services are available—including needle–syringe programmes, drug dependence treatment and HIV testing and treatment—will kick-start progress on stopping new HIV infections among people who use drugs.

With scaling-up of HIV and other health services in low- and middle-income countries, an increasing amount of personally identifiable health information is being collected at health facilities and stored in data repositories at local, regional and national levels. Countries need to protect the confidentiality and security of identifiable and de-identified personal health information, and this can be accomplished in part through the existence and implementation of relevant privacy laws, policies and programmes.

Based on privacy, confidentiality and security principles an Assessment Tool was developed to assess in country the extent that the confidentiality and security of personal health information is protected at facility and data warehouse/repository levels and whether national guidelines exist including privacy laws. A Manual on the use of the Assessment Tool has been produced and is available below. 

Gender discrimination and gender-based violence fuel the HIV epidemic. Gender norms in many cultures combined with taboos about sexuality have a huge impact on the ability of adolescent girls and young women to protect their health and prevent HIV, seek health services and make their own informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health and lives.

Thailand has made outstanding progress in reversing the AIDS epidemic. To achieve the government’s commitment on Sustainable Development Goal 3.3 to end AIDS by 2030, several challenges remain particularly ensuring that key populations (KPs) are the focus of interventions. Evidence has shown that civil society organisations (CSOs) are more capable of reaching out and maintaining connections with KPs than public healthcare providers. Funding support from the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria (Global Fund) and other international development partners (IDPs) for addressing HIV/AIDS is gradually diminishing.

The 2018 Global Overview outlines key trends across the at least 35 countries that retain the death penalty for drug offences in law, and analyses data on death sentences and executions from the last decade. Extensive examination is provided on the divergent trends witnessed in 2018 of falling execution numbers globally, and rising appeal for reimplementation of the death penalty in some countries, while considering the role public opinion plays in all of this.

Countries in Asia implement some of the harshest drug policies in the world. As United Nations (UN) member states are set to meet in March 2019 to take stock of progress made since 2009 and delineate the next phase for global drug policy, ‘10 Years of Drug Policy in Asia: How Far Have We Come?’ evaluates the impacts of drug policies in Asia over the past decade from a civil society perspective. The critical role of civil society in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of drug policies is acknowledged in the 2009 Political Declaration and Plan of Action, as well as in the Outcome Document of the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs. Using data from the UN, academic literature and contributions from civil society, this report aims to provide a critical assessment of drug policy failures and successes across the region, with the aim of informing high-level discussions on the next decade of drug policy.

The 2018-19 Afghanistan Service Provision Assessment focused on tertiary/specialty and private hospitals. The assessment was conducted between November 2018 and January 2019. The overall goal of the survey was to gather information on the availability, readiness, and quality of health services in national specialty and provincial/regional hospitals, including major private sector hospitals in seven major urban areas (Kabul, Herat, Balkh, Kandahar, Nangarhar, Kunduz, Paktya). The assessment focused on specific service areas within the hospitals, which included family planning, maternal and child health, surgery, pediatrics, emergencies, intensive care, delivery, and newborn care. The findings will serve as a baseline for monitoring these services and progress over time.