African AIDS Vaccine Programme (AAVP) - Africa

In order for AAVP to achieve its goals, a number of research/training/capacity-building activities have been implemented in the following five-thematic areas:

• Advocacy and resource mobilisation: This involves identifying partners and donors, community mobilisation, and resource mobilisation in support of AAVP goals, as well as information dissemination.
• Biomedical sciences: This involves identifying and strengthening laboratory expertise, HIV isolation and characterisation, immunology methods for vaccine evaluation, and appropriate conduct of clinical trials.
• Population studies: This includes identification and strengthening of potential sites for vaccine trials and socio/behavioural research protocols to support vaccine trials.
• Ethics, law, and human rights: This programme assesses research ethics infrastructures, builds capacity for ethics law and human rights, and supports the development of national guidelines.
• National strategic planning: Assesses vaccine activities in National AIDS Programmes, supports development and implementation of National AIDS Vaccine Plans/Strategies, and also addresses issues related to future access to HIV vaccines.

AAVP operates and implements most of its activities through a network of collaborative centers (CCs), located across the continent. All CCs are guided by the following strategic directions: capacity strengthening, advocacy, policy development, increased community involvement, and networking. AAVP has employed the services of Madame Jeannette, the wife of Ugandan president as an AAVP representative, in order to ensure the organisation is adequately represented at a political level. She is expected to drive the programme at a political level and act as AAVP's "Ambassador" at various meetings and policy forums. The AAVP representative works closely with the AAVP secretariat, the AAVP CCs, the secretariat of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, and the relevant WHO structures that are set up to influence and advocate for countries.

According to the organisers, AAVP has expanded and increased training and capacity building in the areas of community and media education, ethics, and laboratory and good clinical and regulatory practices specific to HIV vaccine development. It has facilitated:

• an international discussion of the inclusion of adolescents in HIV vaccine trials;
• the identification of capacity needs of 35 African research ethics committees to review HIV vaccine trials; and
• the development of discussion documents on topics such as enrollment of women in trials, intellectual property, and tissue transfer issues.

HIV/AIDS

AAVP aims to ensure that African communities and Africans participating in the HIV vaccine development process are adequately supported, are well represented globally, and are equal partners playing a critical role in HIV vaccine development efforts. The establishment of this programme owes itself to the disproportionate HIV/AIDS infection rates in Africa. With reference to the organisation, sub-Saharan Africa has just over 10% of the world's population but is home to more than 65% of the 33 million people in the world estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS. The annual rate of new infections continues to rise.