Hi Everyone,

I'm currently attending the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on AIDS (UNGASS) 5 year Review (from May 31 - June 2), and UNGASS Youth Summit (May 29 - 30). The Youth Summit is being organized by the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS (GYCA), Advocates for Youth and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). (There are too many acronyms!)

We hope to bring back lessons from the summit, to feed into youth activities for the upcoming conference in Toronto. It has been really amazing as there are over 65 youth from more than 25 countries attending the summit alone!

We had the opportunity to ask Dr. Peter Piot (Executive Director of UNAIDS) a lot of different questions and get up-to-date information on UNAIDS work around young people and HIV/AIDS; and the challenges of ensuring meaningful youth participation within HIV programming. As one participant put it, it's important to move away from having youth as merely 'accessories' or 'tokens' in programmes, but actually give the technical capacity to participate.

For me, a really important component of the day, was a presentation on evidence-based HIV prevention Interventions. (This will be part of a publication that will be launched in Toronto jointly by UNICEF, WHO and other organizations). I thought that this is particularly important as we are moving from simply documenting 'best practices' to actually stating what works, and can potentially be scaled up and have a more sustainable impact on prevention models

With half of all new infections occurring among young people and around 6,000 young people newly infected with HIV/AIDS - It is certainly time to act!