Background The global community is committed to elimination of mother-to-child transmission (EMTCT) of HIV and syphilis as public health problems. International and regional goals have been set, and countries are scaling up programmes towards EMTCT. Regional initiatives in the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Africa have approached control of MTCT of HIV and syphilis as an integrated process. Prior to this work, there were no internationally standardised processes and criteria to validate EMTCT of HIV or syphilis.

Methods As the global community prepares to assess progress towards global health goals in 2015 and beyond, standardised processes and criteria are needed to assess and validate EMTCT of HIV and syphilis across widely varying epidemiologic and programmatic contexts. This presentation will review the process for development of minimum global processes and criteria, provide a description of global validation targets and indicators, explain validation procedures, including maintenance of validation status, and describe next steps at the global, regional, and national levels.

Results These guidelines are intended for use by national, regional, and global validation committees; national AIDS, sexually transmitted infection, maternal, and child health programme managers; monitoring and evaluation (M&E) officers; policy-makers; and international partners. Currently there are at least 4 regions moving forward with establishment of regional processes for validation, and several countries have expressed interest in applying for validation of EMTCT of HIV and/or syphilis.

Conclusions As experience is gained through establishment of global and regional validation processes, additional guidance and tools will be developed to complement these initial minimum global standards. Although it is recognised that not all countries are able to meet these criteria at this time, these criteria can also serve as aspirational targets for countries for 2015 and beyond and an opportunity to improve programmes and monitoring systems, reduce disparities within countries, and highlight models of success.