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Knowledge about HIV prevention in young people

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HIV/AIDS

What you should know about this indicator

The ongoing spread of HIV is largely driven by sexual transmission among young people. Comprehensive knowledge about HIV and AIDS is essential for adopting behaviors that reduce the risk of transmission.

This indicator measures the percentage of respondents that answered "YES" to all the responses below:

  1. Can the risk of HIV transmission be reduced by having sex with only one uninfected partner who has no other partners?
  2. Can a person reduce the risk of getting HIV by using a condom every time they have sex?
  3. Can a healthy-looking person have HIV?
  4. Can a person get HIV from mosquito bites?
  5. Can a person get HIV by sharing food with someone who is infected?

The first three questions should not be altered. Questions 4 and 5 ask about local misconceptions and may be replaced by the most common misconceptions in your country. Examples include: “Can a person get HIV by hugging or shaking hands with a person who is infected?” and “Can a person get HIV through supernatural means?”

Those who have never heard of HIV and AIDS should be excluded from the numerator but included in the denominator. An answer of “don't know” should be recorded as an incorrect answer.

Scores for each of the individual questions (based on the same denominator) are required as well as the score for the composite indicator.

Knowledge about HIV prevention in young people
Percentage of young people aged 15-24 who correctly identify both methods of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV and reject major misconceptions about HIV transmission.
Source
Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
January 22, 2025
Date range
2000–2018
Unit
%

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says HIV/AIDS by Our World in Data

HIV / AIDS

Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

UNAIDS leads the world's most extensive data collection on HIV epidemiology, programme coverage and finance and publishes the most authoritative and up-to-date information on the HIV epidemic.

In some cases there is no data for some country and year. This can be a result of very small epidemics among women in the reproductive age which makes estimation of the mother to child transmission very unstable. Another reason for missing data is that relevant authorities may have asked UNAIDS not to share their estimates.

This UNAIDS 2024 report brings together new data and case studies which demonstrate that the decisions and policy choices taken by world leaders this year will decide the fate of millions of lives and whether the world's deadliest pandemic is overcome.

Retrieved on
January 22, 2025
Retrieved from
https://aidsinfo.unaids.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The urgency of now: AIDS at a crossroads. Geneva: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS; 2024. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. Full report: https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/2024-unaids-global-aids-update_en.pdf

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Knowledge about HIV prevention in young people”, part of the following publication: Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie (2023) - “HIV / AIDS”. Data adapted from Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/young-people-with-knowledge-on-hiv-prevention [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Knowledge about HIV prevention in young people” [dataset]. Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, “Global AIDS Update” [original data]. Retrieved March 10, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/young-people-with-knowledge-on-hiv-prevention