Making the Children of Key Populations a Priority for Equitable Development

Recently, Lisa Bohmer and Noreen Huni, Coalition Chair and Co-chair, authored a blog on the Huffington Post highlighting the challenges facing children of key HIV and AIDS affected populations.

Allow me to introduce you to a young, HIV positive mother—we’ll call her “Sarah”—in South Africa. Sarah is living in extreme poverty. To ensure her child has food and shelter, she is a sex worker, likely how she contracted the disease. Forced with the untenable choice of providing either food or childcare—she cannot afford both—she locks her baby in the house while she works. She is consumed with thoughts of how often the baby cries, and worries what will happen if her home catches fire or someone breaks in while she is gone.

Sarah is not alone. And her baby is far from the only child that is suffering.

Today, on World AIDS Day, we can’t forget that this experience is the reality for many of those whom the global health community has determined to be most vulnerable to HIV and AIDS–not only sex workers like Sarah, but also people who use drugs, transgender people, and men who have sex with men. While the global health community has worked for many years to determine the best way to fight HIV and AIDS among key affected populations, we know very little at all about their children.