Global monitoring of collaborative TB-HIV activities

Tuberculosis (TB) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) programs are increasingly working together towards providing universal access to integrated TB and HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services. To monitor progress we need to measure the delivery and impact of these services; however, the lack of investment in monitoring and evaluation and the added complexity of sharing data between two vertical programs, makes monitoring and evaluation of collaborative TB-HIV activities especially challenging. We describe the global system to record, report and analyse data on collaborative TB-HIV activities and summarize results to date. Although the data suggest that there is a steady increase in collaborative TB-HIV activities in many high-burden countries over time, we are already falling behind the globally agreed implementation milestones. This is due to a combination of slow implementation and lack of necessary tools and systems for capturing activity data. In particular, data from HIV program monitoring of TB screening, TB preventive treatments and TB infection control for people living with HIV is lacking. Much remains to be done by both programs to improve the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of collaborative TB-HIV activities and to optimize prevention, treatment and care for people infected with both TB and HIV, especially in areas at high risk of drug-resistant TB.