About
What is the Siyakhula Collaborative workshop?
Our two-day workshop, funded by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, will bring together a group of international, multidisciplinary health scientists, clinicians, and stakeholders to build capacity for research and training in HIV-infection and women’s and infants’ health across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Ultimately, we seek to understand the relationships between biological, social and environmental factors on health outcomes in HIV-infected mothers and their infants.
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What does Siyakhula mean? 
Siyakhula means to grow, in Zulu, and represents the growing the need to lessen the impact and lasting burden of HIV exposure for optimal development and health of future generations. 

Statistics
​In 2016, there were 3.1 million children worldwide living with HIV, and 60 000 children were newly infected
Antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage for pregnant women in South Africa is now estimated at 99.45%
Globally, 1.3 million women living with HIV become pregnant annually
As access to ART for pregnant and breastfeeding women increases, the population of HIV-exposed, uninfected infants continues to rise
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It remains unclear how the persistent inflammation, immune dysfunction, and metabolic abnormalities experienced by pregnant and breastfeeding women on ART shape development of the uninfected infant

Workshop Goals
  • Summarise the state of knowledge on HIV and ART exposure in utero, without infant infection, on infant development and health in the first 3 years of life

  • Identify gaps in existing research on modifiable exposures that may be associated with poor growth, neurocognitive development, and risk for infectious diseases;

  • Understand the health needs of HIV-infected women and their infants, and identify gaps in existing services/practices to meet these needs;

  • Nurture collaborations within a multidisciplinary team of researchers to build capacity of local and international researchers and community members to participate in and contribute to HIV research, with a final aim to uncover why some mothers and HIV exposed but uninfected infants are more susceptible to, or protected from, poor health outcomes associated with HIV

What we learned
Read our workshop report in Journal Of Multidisciplinary Healthcare

Questions?

References: 
UNAIDS. (2014). The Gap Report. Geneva.
UNAIDS. (2017). AIDSinfo: 2017 Global AIDS Monitoring (GAM) Data
UNAIDS. (2017). Ending AIDS: progress towards the 90–90–90 targets.
UNAIDS. (2018). Global AIDS Monitoring 2018.