Introduction: Persistently high HIV incidence among women, especially adolescent girls and young women (AGYW), have drawn the attention of national policymakers, donors, and implementers in Sub-Saharan Africa to the integration of HIV and family planning (FP) programs. According to several research studies, FP services could offer a holistic strategy to address the HIV and FP needs of this demographic by including HIV prevention approaches, particularly HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. Our study set out to explore the obstacles and opportunities that AGYW faced in accessing, using, and continuing HIV prevention and contraceptive services; to develop ideas for novel service models that would allow AGYW to receive integrated, HIV prevention and contraception services; and to evaluate the viability, scalability, and acceptability of these models through dialogues with stakeholders using a human-centered design approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Engaging communities in the design, implementation and monitoring of health services is critical for delivering high-quality, person-centred services that keep people living with HIV engaged in care. The USAID-funded Integrated HIV/AIDS Project in Haut-Katanga (IHAP-HK) integrated an electronic client feedback tool into continuous quality improvement (CQI) processes. We aimed to demonstrate this system's impact on identifying and improving critical quality-of-care gaps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), men who have sex with men (MSM) and female sex workers (FSW) have the highest HIV prevalence but have the least access to services due to their marginalization within Congolese society.
Methods: The Projet Intégré de VIH/SIDA au Congo (ProVIC) aims to reduce the risk and impact of HIV in the DRC through community- and facility-based prevention, counseling and testing, and treatment strategies aimed at high-risk populations, including MSM and FSW. To more effectively meet the needs of key populations, ProVIC tailored the existing interventions to better suit MSM and FSW by offering mobile counseling and rapid HIV testing services at night in MSM and FSW "hotspots," targeting outreach to and mobilizing key populations through social networks of MSM and FSW peer educators and recruiters, and referring MSM and FSW who test HIV positive to "friendly" clinics.