Theme: Plenaries & invited speakers Year: 2025
This session explored the implementation of harm reduction in South Africa, highlighting how progress has been made by navigating policy barriers, engaging diverse stakeholders – including law enforcement – and mobilising donor and limited domestic funding. The presentation emphasised the importance of designing services that respond to local patterns of drug use, infectious disease burden, and health system capacity, alongside strong community and peer involvement. Despite ongoing challenges such as criminalisation, stigma, policy gaps, and resource constraints, examples of local government leadership, civil society advocacy, and phased pilots demonstrated how evidence, partnerships, and political will have enabled incremental scale‑up of harm reduction services in an emerging setting.
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