There is a close correlation between HIV prevalence and poverty in our world. Poor people are less likely to have access to information, education and health services. This significantly increases the risk they run of becoming infected. HIV plunges poor individuals into a poverty trap, when the breadwinner becomes sick, or when families find themselves facing high bills for health care and drugs. There is frequently not enough money left over for food, or to send the children to school.
This is why the United Nations' Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 6 reads, "Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS" (Target 7) and "Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases (Target 8). At the UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS in 2001, the international community also set itself the goal of ensuring universal access to prevention, treatment and care by 2010 (Universal Access Initiative).

In its Programme of Action 2015, the German government focuses strongly on poverty reduction. The HIV/AIDS strategy of the German government and the BMZ position paper on HIV/AIDS provide the framework for the work of GIZ.
Against this background and given international political commitments, the central tasks involved in the response to AIDS today are as follows:

• Developing, disseminating and realising practice-relevant prevention, treatment and care programmes, including the reduction of mother-to-child transmission of HIV
• Developing and realising strategies which take into account gender-specific differences in access to HIV prevention services and AIDS treatment as well as the different degrees to which women and men are affected by the HIV pandemic
• Realising multi-sectoral approaches in order to tackle the consequences of HIV, which represent an obstacle in many development-relevant sectors, and to harness the contributions made by all sectors to fight the scourge.