Reaching Youth Through Faith Leaders: Evaluation of the Faith Matters! Initiative.

Faith leaders can be uniquely positioned to guide and support young people on health issues, particularly HIV/AIDS and sexual violence. Faith Matters!, a 2-day training workshop for faith leaders, was delivered in September 2021 in Zambia. Sixty-six faith leaders completed a questionnaire at baseline, 64 at posttraining, and 59 at 3-month follow-up.

Integration of assisted partner services within Kenya's national HIV testing services program: A qualitative study.

Assisted partner service (aPS) augments HIV case-finding among sex partners to individuals newly diagnosed with HIV. In 2016, aPS was incorporated into the national HIV testing services (HTS) program in Kenya. We evaluated the extent of, barriers to, and facilitators of aPS integration into HTS.

Conceptualizing Consent: Cross-national and Temporal Representations of Sexual Consent in Young Africans' Creative Narratives on HIV.

Sexual violence, comprising all non-consensual sexual acts, is an important driver of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa. Definitions of sexual violence rely on understandings of sexual consent, understood as a feeling of willingness that is communicated via shared indicators of consent. In this paper, through analysis of young authors' narrative-based social representations, we sought to provide insight into young Africans' sense-making around sexual consent in order to develop a conceptual framework that can guide future methodological and conceptual work.

Making sense of fidelity: young Africans' cross-national and longitudinal representations of fidelity and infidelity in their HIV-related creative narratives, 1997-2014.

Mutual fidelity and partner reduction have been identified as key behavioural strategies to prevent HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly following recognition of the role that multiple concurrent sexual partnerships play in driving generalised HIV epidemics. We analysed social representations of fidelity and infidelity in a sample of 1,343 narratives about HIV written by young Africans between 1997 and 2014. The narratives were written at four different time points (1997, 2005, 2008, 2014) by authors aged 10-24 in urban and rural areas of Senegal, Burkina Faso, South-east Nigeria, Kenya and Eswatini.

High Acceptability of Assisted Partner Notification Services Among HIV-Positive Females in Kenya: Results From an Ongoing Implementation Study.

Background: Assisted partner services (aPS) involves notification and HIV testing for sexual partners of persons diagnosed HIV-positive (index clients). Because the impact of aPS is contingent on high acceptance, we assessed characteristics and reasons for nonenrollment among female index clients in an ongoing scale-up project.

Methods: We analyzed data from HIV-positive females offered aPS in 31 facilities from May 2018 to August 2019.

Social representations of the prevention of heterosexual transmission of HIV among young Africans from five countries, 1997-2014.

HIV prevention has evolved dramatically since the 1990s. The ABC trilogy (abstinence, be faithful, use a condom) has expanded to incorporate a range of biomedical prevention strategies, including voluntary medical male circumcision, pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis, and treatment-as-prevention, and to accommodate structural and combination prevention approaches. This study examines how young Africans from five epidemiologically and socio-culturally diverse countries (Swaziland, Kenya, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Senegal) made sense of the evolving prevention of sexual transmission of HIV between 1997 and 2014.

Young Africans' social representations of sexual abuse of power in their HIV-related creative narratives, 2005-2014: cultural scripts and applied possibilities.

The sexual abuse of power is a form of sexual coercion in which individuals - typically male - use their positions of authority to obtain sex. We analysed social representations of sexual abuse of power in a sample of 1,446 narratives about HIV written by young Africans between 2005 and 2014. The narratives were prepared at five different points in time (2005, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014) by authors aged 10-24 in urban and rural areas of Swaziland, Kenya, South-East Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Senegal.