The International HIV/AIDS Alliance is an international nongovernmental organization that supports community action on HIV/AIDS in developing countries.

The Alliance aims to:

• make a significant contribution to HIV prevention, care and support to children affected by the epidemic, by working together with communities in developing countries;

• promote the sustainability and scaling-up of effective community AIDS efforts, by building the capacity of CBOs, NGOs and NGO support programmes;

• influence and improve the HIV/AIDS policies and programmes of international agencies, donors and the international NGO sector, with particular emphasis on the role of community action.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the world's leading international public health agency. The mission of WHO in essential medicines is to help save lives and to improve health by closing the huge gap between the potential that essential medicines have to offer and the reality that, for millions of people around the world, medicines are unavailable, unaffordable, unsafe or improperly used.

To achieve this mission, WHO's essential medicines strategy has the following broad objectives:

• to help countries to develop and implement national drug policies and to integrate essential medicines into national health systems;

• to work with countries to enhance access to essential medicines, particularly to medicines for priority diseases;

• to strengthen the quality, safety and efficacy of all medicines through developing and putting into practice global regulatory and quality assurance standards;

• to help to ensure that health professionals and consumers use medicines properly and provide the public with independent, unbiased information about medicines, including information on traditional medicines.

To address the many factors driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and help countries deal with the impact of HIV/AIDS on households, communities and local economies, the United Nations took an innovative approach in 1996, drawing six organizations together in a joint and cosponsored programme - the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The six original cosponsors of UNAIDS - the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), WHO and the World Bank - were joined in April 1999 by the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), and in 2001 by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

As the leading advocate for worldwide action against HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS leads, strengthens and supports an expanded response to the epidemic that will:

• prevent the spread of HIV;
• provide care and support for those infected and affected by the disease;
• reduce the vulnerability of individuals and communities to HIV/AIDS; and
• alleviate the socioeconomic and human impact of the epidemic.