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Stop TB Partnership Secretariat engaged with essential partners to support their efforts and country TB programmes to advance in the fight to end TB in the European Region to prepare the ground for the UN High Level Meeting for TB in 2018. In just one week, three regional meetings held in Astana, Kazakhstan, in Tallinn, Estonia and Minsk, Belarus put TB in the spotlight in a region that can lead the way towards a world free of TB.  The discussions were centered around migration and migrants and their access to services, how to sustain and expand programmes after donor support ends and how communities, civil society, and networks of people affected by TB can work together.

The ‘Improved TB/HIV Prevention & Care – Building Models for the Future’ project was presented during the Dutch National Congress ‘Soa.Hiv.Seks’ on 1 December 2017 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Three working models from Kazakhstan, the Philippines, and Nigeria implemented by AFEW, Hivos and PharmAccess with KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation as the lead agency were shown to the Congress audience.

From 8 July to 20 October 2017, a train carriage went throughout the territory of Russia offering HIV testing services to everyone interested. The campaign was aimed at raising the awareness and increasing the coverage with testing services among the general public. The train offering HIV testing is a project of the Russian Ministry of Health in cooperation with the Russian Railways. The campaign was initiated within the State Strategy to Combat the Spread of HIV in Russia through 2020.

Over 400 students from universities of the CIS countries took part in the first international debate tournament on HIV “SpeakUp: AIDS” in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Among the debate participants, there was the best 2017 speaker in the world representing the international debate movement, the main judge Raffy Marshall (Oxford), students from the major higher educational institutions of the country as well as from the UK, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Sweden. The international panel selected 120 teams to take part in debates on this critical social issue. The tournament was held in line with the British parliament model.

In her memories, her life is divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ she learned she had HIV. As strange as it may seem, with the therapy ‘after’ is not a verdict, not a tragedy, not the end… We are meeting 29-year-old Amina (the name has been changed) in one of the coffee houses in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. She came to our meeting after work, short of breath, as she was afraid to be late. Good looking, with a glow of health on her cheeks, a strand of hair appearing from under her neatly tied headscarf, and snow-white teeth. One could say that she was to the full of her health. Sipping her coffee, she tells her story.

Sanat Alemi is one of the civil society organizations (CSOs) supported by the Improved TB/HIV prevention & care – Building models for the future project which gives support to TB patients and their relatives. Founded in 2016 in Almaty, Kazakhstan by a group of ex multidrug-resistant or extensively drug-resistant TB patients, they quickly showed successes through their established self-support groups as well as one-to-one TB patient support. Sanat Alemi is also implementing several community-based activities such as social mobilization, advocacy, and communication to improve TB literacy among people affected by TB, TB/HIV, AIDS and other socially significant diseases (drug abuse, alcoholism, etc), aiming at reducing stigma, discrimination.

AFEW International supports the large-scale campaign “Неопределяемый значит не передающий” (Undetectable means Untransmittable) aimed at overcoming stigma against