Community leadership to advance responsive and inclusive EVT services

Immaculate Owomugisha Bazare is a social justice lawyer and health and gender justice advocate. She is Executive Director of Centre for Women Justice Uganda leading litigation, advocacy and movement building to advance HIV justice, SRHR, and the rights of women, girls and key populations

Since 1999, the Movement has carried out its work through strategic lines of action oriented to the national context, prioritizing the realities and needs of women living with HIV in Panama. These include:
• Accompaniment and guidance: Support spaces that provide information, emotional support, and referral for women living with HIV and/or survivors or potential survivors of gender-based violence, promoting access to health services, rights, and tools for informed decision-making.
• Advocacy and social participation: Actions aimed at making visible the needs of women living with HIV, promoting the adoption of gender-sensitive public policies, and strengthening their participation in community and institutional processes.
• Organizational strengthening: Ongoing internal development through norms, procedures, and practices that ensure efficient, responsible, and transparent management.
• Training and capacity building: Education in human rights, leadership, stigma and discrimination prevention, and other issues relevant to the comprehensive well-being of women living with HIV.
• Project management and partnerships: Implementation of initiatives funded by national and international organizations, ensuring the appropriate use of resources, achievement of objectives, and institutional transparency.

Chimika Phiri is a pediatrician and public health specialist leading HIV prevention programming at the Ministry of Health. With expertise in child, adolescent, and population health, he drives evidence-based strategies to strengthen national HIV prevention and service delivery.

Hafsat Iyanda is the National PMTCT Lead at the National HIV/AIDS Viral Hepatitis and STI Control Programme (NASCP) at the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (FMOH&SW), Nigeria, where she coordinates the National Programme and interventions for the Prevention of Mother-To-Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV/Syphilis/Hepatitis B.

She coordinates national efforts to strengthen maternal and child health services through the integration of HIV, syphilis, and hepatitis B interventions, with a focus on achieving the elimination of vertical transmission (EVT) of the three diseases.

She works closely with ministries, departments, agencies, development partners, and implementing partners to advance policy, scale up evidence-based interventions, and improve access to quality maternal and child health services across Nigeria.

Dr. Linda Nabitaka Kisaakye brings over twenty years of experience across all levels of Uganda’s health system, as a clinician, hospital superintendent, district health officer, and national program coordinator, giving her both operational depth and strategic reach.

At the Ministry of Health, she has played a central role in advancing Uganda’s triple elimination strategy for the vertical transmission of HIV, syphilis, and hepatitis B. Her leadership has spanned the uptake and scale up diagnostics and treatment, the development of national training curricula, the implementation of integrated services across the maternal and child health platform, and research.

Dr. Nabitaka led innovations, including a field pilot of point-of-care hepatitis B viral load testing in antenatal clinics in Uganda, with findings published in PLOS Global Public Health (2026). Her broader leadership in preventing vertical transmission of HIV contributed to a national decline in transmission rates from 25% in 2010 to 2.7% by 2019, as shown in the Uganda PMTCT Impact Evaluation 2019.

She has co-authored several peer-reviewed publications across journals, including BMC Public Health, PLOS One, JAIDS, and MMWR, and continues to generate implementation-driven evidence from the frontlines of care.