World AIDS Day Report 2025 : Overcoming Disruption: Transforming the AIDS Response

Funding cuts in 2025 have devastated HIV prevention, crippling community-led services that reach marginalized groups. Punitive laws further restrict access to PrEP and essential care, widening protection gaps. Despite setbacks, innovation, investment and global solidarity illuminate a hopeful pathway to end AIDS.

The 2025 funding crisis has thrown the AIDS response into turmoil with massive disruptions to HIV prevention and community led services, particularly for the most vulnerable. Community-led services, vital to reaching marginalized populations, are being deprioritized while the rise in punitive laws criminalizing same-sex relationships, gender identity, and drug use is amplifying the crisis, making HIV services inaccessible. However, the new report by UNAIDS shows evidence that resilience, investment and innovation combined with global solidarity still offer a path to end AIDS. Abrupt reductions in international HIV assistance in 2025 have deepened existing funding shortfalls. The OECD estimates that external health assistance is projected to drop by 30–40% in 2025 compared with 2023, causing immediate and even more severe disruption to health services in low- and middle-income countries. Prevention services—already under strain before the crisis—have been hit hardest. Major reductions in access medicines to prevent HIV (pre-exposure prophylaxis referred to as PrEP) and sharp declines in voluntary medical male circumcision for HIV prevention have left a growing protection gap for millions. The dismantling of HIV prevention programmes designed with and for young women have deprived adolescent girls and young women of HIV prevention, mental health, and gender-based violence services in many countries. This increases their vulnerability further—already in 2024 there were globally 570 new HIV infections every day among young women and girls aged 15—24. Community-led organizations—the backbone of the HIV response and who were able to reach people most vulnerable to HIV—report widespread closures, with more than 60% of women-led organizations suspending essential programmes. Services for key populations including men who have sex with men, sex workers, people who inject drugs and transgender people have also been severely impacted. A failure to reach the 2030 global HIV targets of the next Global AIDS Strategy could result in an additional 3.3 million new HIV infections between 2025 and 2030.