In September 2008, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) was commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to carry out a stocktaking review of research on HIV and AIDS in the education sector. The aim of this review was to identify research that had been carried out by the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT) on Education, its members and others, and to identify gaps and ways of complementing and building on existing research. A total of 133 documents were reviewed for the first stocktaking exercise. Following this, the IATT commissioned a more comprehensive second-phase stocktaking exercise, which built on the first, updated it with missing and more recent publications in the field of HIV and AIDS in the education sector, and provided more in-depth analysis of the data, including an assessment of the quality of the evidence presented.

This report assesses the quality of the evidence available and aims to provide the IATT with a summary of the quality and type of evidence available, indicating where strengths and weaknesses lie, in order to make suggestions for future research.