PEPFAR DREAMS Partnership

A public-private HIV prevention partnership announced by the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2014, aimed at reducing new HIV infections among adolescent girls and young women in the sub-Saharan African countries carrying the highest share of the global burden among that group. DREAMS, an acronym standing for Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored and Safe, combined PEPFAR's own funding with contributions from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Girl Effect, Gilead Sciences, Johnson and Johnson and ViiV Healthcare, and began work in ten countries, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, before later expanding to fifteen. Rather than treating HIV risk as a purely biomedical problem, DREAMS delivers a layered package of interventions addressing the structural drivers behind girls' and young women's vulnerability, among them gender-based violence, exclusion from schooling and lack of economic opportunity, and by the program's own five-year data, released on World AIDS Day 2019, new HIV diagnoses among adolescent girls and young women had fallen by 25 percent or more in nearly every district where DREAMS operated.