How ignoring trans populations is hampering Africa's fight against HIV

Though transgender and gender-diverse people are 13 times more likely to acquire HIV than the rest of the adult population, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, researchers have hardly looked at the barriers that keep members of the community in sub-Saharan Africa from getting tested — and, if they are positive, started on life-saving treatment.

An attempt to determine the global impact of HIV on transgender women in 2012 found there was no quantitative data available from Africa. Little has changed since then, activists say. The result is an absence of even basic information, like HIV prevalence, to help build effective programs and to counter the stigma and discrimination they say keeps some countries from even establishing those programs in the first place.

“Data can help in terms of making sure that government entities actually adopt specific interventions,” Lawrence Phiri Chipili, the executive director of the Lesbian Intersex Trans and other Extensions organization in Malawi, told Devex. But without more research that directly involves the transgender and broader LGBTQI+ community, “it’s going to be difficult to actually end HIV as a public health threat by 2030” — a goal set by UNAIDS.