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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.

Success with harm reduction has recently been achieved in Tajikistan. HIV epidemic amongst injecting drug users also seems to stabilize and even decline. Unfortunately, HIV is still increasing as now it also enters wider community around people who use drugs (PUD) and other key populations. Sexual transmission of HIV is rising, and women is the most vulnerable group in this new wave of HIV infections. Besides, in Tajikistan there are other health related issues with tuberculosis, hepatitis and sexual and reproductive health. These are the observations of AFEW International’s director of the programs Janine Wildschut who visited Tajikistan last week to monitor the work of ‘Bridging the Gaps: health and rights for key popualtions’ programme.

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.

Georgia has inadequate policies in the area of sexual and reproductive health and rights. There are strong religious and conservative powers and gender inequality in addition to a fragile civil society that especially influences the lives of adolescents and young people. Much progress has been made in recent years in advocacy to advance youth sexual and reproductive health and rights, for example.

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.