This Outcome Framework is designed to optimise partnerships between the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Secretariat and the funding organisations (Cosponsors) that cosponsor international work on HIV/and AIDS, with the goal of universal access to prevention and treatment. The Outcome Framework, which builds upon the UNAIDS Strategic Framework (2007-2011), is constructed to guide future investment and help with the impact on programmes caused by the challenges of the global financial and economic crisis.

The document identifies 9 priority areas in which, as indicated here, collective action can make a difference if positively impacted by flexibility in planning and budgeting and the ability to monitor progress and results.

In summary, priorities include:

• Reduce sexual transmission of HIV;
• Prevent mothers from dying and babies from becoming infected with HIV;
• Ensure that people living with HIV receive treatment;
• Prevent people living with HIV from dying of tuberculosis;
• Protect drug users from becoming infected with HIV;
• Remove punitive laws, policies, practices, stigma and discrimination that block effective responses to AIDS;
• Empower young people to protect themselves from HIV;
• Stop violence against women and girls; and
• Enhance social protection for people affected by HIV.

Cross-cutting strategies included in the document are the following:

1. "Bring AIDS planning and action into national development policy and broader accountability frameworks;
2. Optimize UN support for applications to, and programme implementation of, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria;
3. Improve country-by-country strategic information generation, analysis and use, including through the mobilization of novel sources;
4. Assess and realign the management of technical assistance programmes;
5. Develop shared messages for sustained political commitment, leadership development and advocacy; and
6. Broaden and strengthen engagement with communities, civil society and networks of people living with HIV at all levels of the response."

The document directs UNAIDS staff to focus on: brokering and unifying the management of technical support; producing strategic analyses of programmatic quality to improve results-based implementation; enabling political agents to demand change in governance, legislation, and policy; developing oversight structures to ensure accountability; and supporting the Cosponsors, in order to maximise their country level works towards to achieving universal access.

The prevention section of the document recommends addressing the specific needs associated with prevention in each key population, including youth, women and girls, sex workers and their clients, injecting drug users, men who have sex with men, prisoners, refugees, and migrants. "Combination HIV prevention means providing services and programmes for individuals, such as promoting the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake safe behaviours. These include knowledge of HIV status, knowledge of risks, reducing concurrent and serial sexual partners, using condoms consistently, scaling-up male circumcision and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission services. Combination HIV prevention needs investment in structural interventions, including legal reforms to outlaw discrimination against people living with HIV and the enforcement of laws that prohibit sexual and gender-based violence. It also requires the promotion of a desire for behaviour change while simultaneously acting to shift community norms and broader social environments."

The document concludes that if countries were to "reach their 2010 targets for universal access, a dramatic change in the course of the epidemic would follow." This requires establishing baselines, measuring progress, and monitoring success or failure using multiple sources of data and methodologies.

UNAIDS Publishing Archives website accessed on October 13 2009.