Resource Type: Report
Authors: Matt Hamilton, Laurel Hatt
Published: November 2014

Resource Description: The HIV/AIDS program in St. Kitts and Nevis is at a turning point, facing both opportunities to expand and target its efforts and threats of decreasing funding. As its National HIV/AIDS Strategic Plan expires in 2014, the country must consider whether and how to revise strategic priorities related to controlling and mitigating the effects of the epidemic. Critical decisions must be made about programming and budgeting for the HIV response in the coming years.

This brief provides analytic inputs to help St. Kitts and Nevis develop an “investment case” for its HIV/AIDS program. UNAIDS and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) have encouraged the small-island countries of the eastern Caribbean to develop HIV investment cases – reports that aim to help program leaders target investments on the interventions and populations where they will have maximum impact, given limited resources (UNAIDS 2012).

A key component of UNAIDS’ investment case framework is a quantitative analysis of trends in the HIV epidemic and the impact of various prevention and treatment efforts to date, along with a projection of possible future programming scenarios and their implications for the epidemic and program costs. The Goals and Resource Needs models – part of the Spectrum/OneHealth modeling system that estimates the impact and costs of future prevention and treatment interventions – are UNAIDS’ suggested tools for this type of analysis. With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), experts from the Health Finance and Governance Project have applied these tools to analyze available data from St. Kitts and Nevis. The scenarios described in this report can help the Government of St. Kitts and Nevis and civil society stakeholders to advocate for increased domestic funding for HIV and AIDS, and apply for available external funding from donors.