The Alliance is working with Zambia’s Department of Social Welfare to strengthen community support for orphaned and vulnerable children. In the past, civil society, the private sector and government have often acted in isolation, leading to a less effective response for children.

Partners in Alliance India’s Chaha project have been improving their child counselling skills with specialist training. Participants found out more about innovative approaches for counselling children, such as using arts and crafts, and will be putting their new skills into practice in their day-to-day work.

The Institute of Development Studies and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance have announced a new ongoing research partnership to strengthen the links between evidence, policy and practice. The new partnership will explore topics such as access to treatment and care, health systems and effective influencing strategies.

At the UN high-level meeting on AIDS in New York in June 2008, Alliance India’s Sonal Mehta urged leaders to be bold and not discriminate between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ people living with HIV. Speaking as a civil society representative in one of the panel discussions, Sonal explained how key populations living with HIV faced stigma on three levels and appealed to leaders to support their human rights to health.

An overwhelming response to the Guardian International Development Journalism Competition from amateur and professional journalists has shown that HIV is still high on the public agenda.

Nearly 600 people responded to the survey about the Alliance’s website, online publications and The Loop. The survey results were broadly positive and gave the Alliance valuable feedback about what we could be doing to make our communications more effective.