About the HIV Policy Lab

The HIV Pol­icy Lab is a col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Global Net­work of Peo­ple Liv­ing with HIV (GNP+) , UNAIDS, and oth­ers.

The HIV Pol­icy Lab team has pro­duced and will con­tinue to main­tain and expand this Com­pendium. We are part of the Global Health Pol­icy and Pol­i­tics Ini­tia­tive at George­town Uni­ver­sity’s O’Neill Insti­tute for National and Global Health Law. At the O’Neill Insti­tute we believe that the law is a fun­da­men­tal tool for solv­ing crit­i­cal health prob­lems and sees national and global health law as a fron­tier for col­lab­o­ra­tive, inter­na­tional, and rights-based approaches to health and well-being for all. Our ini­tia­tive advances this vision by con­fronting chal­lenges includ­ing HIV, COVID-19, tuber­cu­lo­sis, health equity, and com­mu­nity-led mon­i­tor­ing with analy­sis of exist­ing pol­icy as well as pro­pos­als for ground­break­ing legal pol­icy responses to health issues.

Our team’s flag­ship prod­uct, the HIV Pol­icy Lab, is a unique col­lab­o­ra­tion between aca­d­e­mic, UN, and civil soci­ety organ­i­sa­tions to track, mea­sure and improve the HIV-related law and pol­icy envi­ron­ment in coun­tries around the world. The HIV Pol­icy Lab research and account­abil­ity plat­form sys­tem­at­i­cally iden­ti­fies and visu­alises poli­cies adopted by coun­tries around the world and how those align with inter­na­tional norms. It is an open, liv­ing global pub­lic resource that draws infor­ma­tion from legal doc­u­ments, gov­ern­ment report­ing, and inde­pen­dent analy­ses to cre­ate data that can be com­pared across coun­tries and across issues. The HIV Pol­icy Lab seeks not just to doc­u­ment, but to improve the pol­icy envi­ron­ment by part­ner­ing with gov­ern­ments, pub­lic health offi­cials, financ­ing agen­cies, and civil soci­ety groups to sup­port learn­ing across coun­tries and sci­ence-based pol­icy change. The Pol­icy Lab also pro­vides researchers with cross-national data on poli­cies so we can learn more about the impacts and dri­vers of pol­icy choices—rec­og­niz­ing that what works in a research set­ting might be not when taken to scale through pol­icy-mak­ing. HIV-related laws and poli­cies can have life and death con­se­quences. We need to mea­sure them, eval­u­ate them, and change them to meet the evolv­ing con­text on the path towards end­ing the global AIDS pan­demic.

This draft of the Com­pendium was writ­ten and researched by Juli­ette McHardy, Maï­mouna Bah, Agrata Sharma and Rachel Sad­off. The ini­tial struc­ture and orig­i­nal research for the pre­lim­i­nary was devised and com­pleted by Mara Pillinger and Kashish Aneja.

The Com­pendium’s con­tent and analy­sis is freely avail­able for use with appro­pri­ate acknowl­edge­ment.

Please read about our other projects and do also check out the HIV Pol­icy Lab’s data on HIV-related laws and poli­cies world­wide.

You can reach us at pol­i­cy­lab@george­town.edu. We wel­come com­ments and cor­rec­tions.