Written by Rose Wilcher, Director, Research Utilization, FHI 360, and Hally Mahler, Project Director, LINKAGES

This blog post was originally featured on FHI 360’s Degrees.

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Next week, leading scientists and cutting-edge thinkers will gather at the International AIDS Society’s 9th IAS Conference on HIV Science in Paris to discuss the latest scientific discoveries in HIV prevention, care and treatment. These discoveries hold the potential to accelerate progress toward the global 90-90-90 targets set forth by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). And, they are especially important for key populations — including men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people and people who inject drugs — who shoulder a disproportionate burden of HIV. UNAIDS estimates that 45% percent of all new HIV infections among adults worldwide occur among these key populations and their sex partners. Reaching these groups with new technologies and approaches is essential to ending the epidemic.

The headway on display at IAS will, we hope, leave us feeling optimistic. However, science cannot have impact unless it is applied in policy and programs. We are working to translate evidence of what works into widespread practice for key populations through the Linkages across the Continuum of HIV Services for Key Populations Affected by HIV (LINKAGES) project, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But progress is slower than it should be, largely because the issues that drive the spread of HIV in key population communities — unrelenting stigma, discrimination, violence and, in many cases, criminalization — also mean that these groups are often the last to benefit from scientific discoveries.

To ensure that new technologies and emerging evidence-based practices reach those who want and need them most, we should do three things.

We need more community-led demand for the latest evidence-based innovations. Even the most compelling evidence does not put itself into practice, especially for the benefit of the most marginalized. When members of key populations demand access to innovations that could make a difference in their lives, that is often the needed catalyst to move research to practice. Organizations led by key populations are chronically underfunded and undervalued, but their voice and engagement are critical to ensuring that evidence-based practices reach them in a way that is safe, appropriate and responsive to their needs.

For example, great strides have been made in recent years using pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as a new HIV prevention option, and it is sure to be a hot topic at the IAS conference. But, PrEP implementation, particularly for key populations, is complex and moving slowly. The International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), a LINKAGES partner, recently convened a global think tank meeting with stakeholders representing the communities that are most affected by HIV to discuss how best to increase access to PrEP. “This was the first time that people from different communities from across the globe sat together in one room to discuss how to demand PrEP on their own terms,” said Solange Baptiste, executive director of ITPC. The discussions at that meeting are informing an upcoming global policy brief and an activist toolkit on PrEP that can accelerate implementation.

We must create an environment that enables the delivery and uptake of evidence-based interventions among those who need them most. Even when the latest prevention, care and treatment options and services are available, stigma, violence and discrimination from health care providers, family members, police, and partners hinder access to services. In many of the countries where LINKAGES works, including Botswana, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Malawi and Suriname, we are systematically integrating violence prevention and response into HIV programming for key populations. We are working to mitigate stigma in health care facilities through the introduction of a text-message-based quality assurance tool that gathers information about key populations’ experiences of stigma and discrimination at health facilities and assesses overall client satisfaction with the care they received.

But, work to dismantle stigma and address violence against key populations, including through policy and legal reforms, always needs more attention. We will miss opportunities for the science to have maximum impact if the environment in which the science needs to be applied is not also progressing.

We need to accompany these efforts with the generation of more evidence through implementation science. Such investments will build collective knowledge about how to introduce proven interventions in real-world contexts, thereby speeding up the pace of replication and implementation at scale.

At the IAS conference, LINKAGES and colleagues from USAID, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and amfAR will convene a satellite session that will present findings from implementation science studies focused on key populations that were conducted in Brazil, Peru, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand. Taken together, these studies contribute important new evidence about how to enhance uptake of and retention in services for key populations, across the HIV prevention, care and treatment cascade. They also illustrate how valuable implementation science is to ensuring that proven interventions achieve results through widespread implementation.

The evidence base on HIV and key populations has grown tremendously in the past several years, and more will come to the fore at the IAS conference. We will be participating with an eye toward how we can move the science into practice so that it benefits as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. The science holds much promise; we cannot let implementation lag.