Honourable Nicolette Henry, Minister of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, and Chair of the PANCAP Regional Coordinating Mechanism, Ambassador Manorma Soeknandan, Deputy Secretary-General, CARICOM, Mr. Mark Oviatt, Principal Officer, USAID, Guyana and Suriname, Ms Sara Mazursky, Deputy Director, Knowledge for Health Project John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Centre for Communication Programmes, Dr Shanti Singh-Anthony, Knowledge Coordinator, PANCAP K4H Project, colleagues of the CARICOM Secretariat, special invitees, viewers, members of the Partnership, members of the media, I extend a warm welcome to you all.

I wish to thank the Government and People of the United States of America and their agencies PEPFAR and USAID for providing the resources for the redesign of our PANCAP website. Thanks is also extended to their Implementing partner John Hopkins University for the ongoing technical assistance to the PANCAP Knowledge for Health Project, of which the redesigned website is a regional public good.

This very generous support from the Government and People of the United States has brought PANCAP’s website into the Twenty First Century and, will enable this medium to function as a ‘one stop shop’ for users seeking up to date information on the regional and global HIV response.

We could not have taken this quantum leap without the technical expertise of the Consultant, Ms Romona Khan who worked diligently with Mr Timothy Austin, Communications Specialist and Dr Shanti Singh-Anthony, Knowledge Coordinator to improve the functionality and interactive features that will enable us to intensify the level of knowledge sharing, capacity building and networking among the PANCAP partners including civil society organisations, National AIDS Programme Managers, clinicians, technical experts in HIV, key populations (and youth within key populations), faith leaders, parliamentarians and regional and development partners.

I wish to thank our partners for providing us with feedback on your information needs. We have listened and acknowledged that you require a more dynamic, knowledge-driven website that offers educational tools to equip users with new knowledge on how to deal with the disease within the changing global and regional HIV landscape. We have also improved the overall functionality so that users can easily navigate the site and receive a wealth of data and information on topics in Dutch, English, French and Spanish.

The new site will feature a highly interactive home page that offers users all the key PANCAP digital tools including instructional toolkits, most recent updates, newly posted documents and a social feed, which highlights posts from PANCAP’s social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. A document library, PANCAP Voices Podcast, Video and Image Galleries, infographics, data and fact sheets and original PANCAP webinars will also be featured on the new website.

The Document Library has added functionality as PANCAP members and partners will be provided with access to upload their original case studies, best practices, policy and strategy documents and other publications for dissemination to the entire Partnership.

We trust that our efforts will also improve capacity building and knowledge management within the Partnership. Please help us to help you by generating and sharing content.

Thank you.