Assessing and enhancing sustainable voluntary medical male circumcision services for HIV prevention in East and Southern Africa: a landscape report of voluntary medical male circumcision priority countries

Übersicht

Male circumcision reduces men’s risk of acquiring HIV through sex with women by approximately 60%. In East and Southern Africa, voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) has been a WHO-recommended HIV combination prevention intervention since 2007. 

The urgent need to scale up VMMC services is crucial. The drive towards more sustainable ways of delivering VMMC services should not take anything away from the urgent need to scale up VMMC services. However, substantial barriers remain. There is a lack of consensus on what sustainable programmes should look like, and on guidance for processes to follow towards sustainability. To begin to address these gaps, WHO developed a set of VMMC sustainability metrics with corresponding assessment tools for national programmes.

This report provides the findings from the baseline implementation of these tools in 15 VMMC priority countries in 2021. It is intended for VMMC national programme leaders and implementing and global partners. Its goals are to describe the baseline status of national VMMC programmes with respect to sustainability, identify programme strengths and weaknesses, and lay out a preliminary vision of the path towards sustainability.