Dear Colleagues, 

After decades of persistently high HIV incidence rates among young women, it is remarkable to see recent and consistent declines across many contexts. This achievement reflects improvements in HIV services and commitments to scale up universal treatment of people living with HIV, confirming the importance of sustained investment in testing, treatment, and prevention for young adult men as well as women. Nonetheless, in some of the highest-burden settings and populations, new infections among 15–24-year-old women remain high in absolute terms, with the pace of reduction too slow to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 3 target to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Furthermore, the global COVID-19 pandemic threatens progress in the related goals of HIV prevention and sustainable development. 

This Special Issue will highlight solutions to accelerate declines in HIV infections among young women and men in the coming decade. We seek evidence of innovations in services, technologies, and implementation that intensify the impact of HIV prevention efforts and can help to drive down new infections by 2030. In particular, we welcome lessons to maximise the demand, supply, and uptake of interventions that integrate:

• Biomedical protection (such as PrEP) with structural and social determinants of risk;
• Strategies to reduce HIV infection and transmission among young men;
• Youth-led and co-created interventions;
• Self-care interventions (e.g., HIV self-testing, STI self-screening, contraception);
• Linkages from HIV testing into prevention services, to strengthen the ‘prevention cascade’;
• Mentoring components for young men and women;
• HIV prevention strategies that directly address gender inequities; and
• Adolescent-friendly strategies that improve provision in both healthcare, e.g., overcoming stigma and resistance of providers, and non-healthcare settings, through demedicaled and decentralised interventions. 

We hope this collection of new insights will help to renew efforts and investments, with a faster track to HIV reduction among adolescents and young people. 

Dr. Isolde Birdthistle
Dr. Gina Dallabetta
Dr. Sanyukta Mathur
Guest Editors

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• HIV prevention
• Adolescents
• Young people
• Gender justice
• Integration
• Self-care interventions
• HIV PrEP
• Youth-friendly/adolescent-friendly services
• Co-creation
• Social determinants