Achieving universal health coverage in a country is an ambitious, but transformative, goal. Communities are essential to the AIDS response and will be essential to the successful roll out of universal health coverage (UHC). When national governments establish a committee to coordinate UHC, it is important to ensure that all relevant communities are involved—civil society, including people living with HIV, should be included in decision-making. If civil society is not engaged early in the development of initiatives for UHC, decisions will be made about health services without the voice of the people most affected by those decisions. The graph below shows four ways in which communities contribute to the design and implementation of UHC.
