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“Kyianka+” group, operating with support from ICF “AIDS Foundation East-West” (AFEW-Ukraine), was created three years ago, and has already helped more than 150 women. Women living with HIV attend monthly meetings, participate in master classes and get psychological counselling. Members of self-help group conduct regular meetings to exchange positive emotions, share success stories and learn how to resist psychological abuse.

The world movement, which already includes more than 70 major cities around the world, has reached Central Asia. The first city, whose authorities signed Paris Declaration with an appeal to stop AIDS epidemic on July 20, 2017, was Almaty.

Starting from 2006, non-commercial organizations in Russia are supported by the president. This was the first year of the presidential grant competition. For 10-year existence, the system of finance distribution was quite complicated: at first the head of the state approved the list of non-commercial organizations (NCO) – the receivers of grants with his decree, and then the NCOs were included into the finance distribution system. In 2017, the procedure was simplified: grant participants may apply online. There has appeared the unified operator – presidential grant foundation.

The community dialogue platform gathered for the summer school last week in Kyrgyzstan. This summer school was organised within ‘Bridging the Gaps’ programme. The director of programs of AFEW International Janine Wildschut attended the school. After some days of serious work in which the community discussed struggles they face in Kyrgyzstan and how they can come up with a united voice, a training on burnout syndrome and how to prevent it was arranged.

A big amount of working age population in Tajikistan (where the entire population is eight million people) take part in labour migration to Russia. After their return to homeland, migrants get diagnosed with tuberculosis and HIV. Experts believe that there should be a complex of prevention activities for HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis among such vulnerable groups as migrants and their sexual partners.

Eastern Europe is a “perfect storm” for the spread of tuberculosis because it has high rates of incarceration, HIV infection, and injection drug use, and it has disintegrated healthcare systems, suboptimal TB diagnosis and treatment, and poor adherence rates. In addition, nearly half of all TB cases are multidrug-resistant, which requires longer, more expensive treatment than drug-susceptible TB, and leads to more adverse effects. Treatment is also less accessible in the region. And because rates of HIV infection are on the rise in Eastern Europe, where antiretroviral therapy coverage is low, the fast progression of immunosuppression leads to increases in the rate of TB and HIV coinfection.