Improving UNAIDS Paediatric and Adolescent Estimates

This document provides paediatric HIV programme managers with an overview of how paediatric and adolescent HIV estimates are produced, what the technical challenges and gaps in the data are, how those challenges are being addressed and what paediatric HIV programme managers and monitoring officers can do to improve their national estimates of the number of children and adolescents living with HIV.

Robust estimates of the number of children and adolescents living with HIV are critical to determining HIV treatment needs and gaps among children. Estimates of the number of new child HIV infections provide evidence of the impact of prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV services. Those data help to plan, advocate, monitor, evaluate, strategize and allocate resources appropriately (1). However, producing strategic information about the HIV epidemic among children can be challenging.