Summary

The potential benefits of giving HIV/AIDS a prominent place in PRSPs and HIPC agreements are substantial. They include greater political attention to and increased domestic funding for the national HIV/AIDS programme, as well as a focus on achieving results in implementing a national HIV/AIDS programme. Crucially, it helps to forge greater consensus among stakeholders on the main strategies and medium-term goals in tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Ideally, the HIV/AIDS contents of PRSPs and HIPC documents would include the following aspects:

· HIV/AIDS as a cause of poverty, plus a discussion of poverty and income inequalities, and their contributions to conditions that make persons vulnerable to HIV infection and less able to cope with the consequences of being infected;

· the main strategies in the national HIV/AIDS plan as a central part of the overall national poverty reduction programme, justified and costed;

· medium-term goals and poverty monitoring indicators derived from the national HIV/AIDS plan; and

· short-run actions for successful implementation of the national HIV/AIDS plan, with specific and monitorable targets that form agreements for debt relief.

This toolkit will serve as a resource for training at the country and subregional levels for country teams and their partners from NGOs and donor agencies. It will enable country teams to develop useful materials on scaled-up HIV/AIDS programmes for inclusion in the PRSPs and HIPC documents. More work will be done to continually improve the toolkit and the processes for building coalitions of partners in support of national responses to HIV/AIDS.