Digital Pulse - Ch 3 - Sec 2 - AIDSMark

Development Issues: HIV/AIDS, Gender, Health, Family Planning, Youth.

Programme Summary

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Population Services International (PSI) signed an agreement for a five-year extension of AIDSMark, a global project that uses social marketing to try to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). A nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., PSI is a leading social marketing organization in the world, with programs in more than 70 countries. PSI uses social marketing to deliver health products, services and information that enable low-income and other vulnerable people to lead healthier lives.This agreement will extend AIDSMark activities until 2007. AIDSMark operates in 29 countries in an effort to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission (MTCT), to delay sexual debut among youth, and to franchise services to treat STIs. All of these programmes operate condom social marketing projects, 14 deliver voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) services, and three offer STI services.

Summary of ICT Initiatives

Social marketing is a powerful tool designed to empower low-income people to lead healthier lives. Social marketing harnesses existing commercial and non-profit channels to get people the information they need, to make health products and services widely available at low cost, and to motivate people to use them and engage in other healthful behaviour. PSI HIV/AIDS prevention social marketing programs are about changing behavioural norms. In countries where PSI conducts HIV/AIDS prevention activities, branded condom social marketing activities—which invoke the condom's brand name—are accompanied by generic communication campaigns that educate and induce such healthy behaviour as abstinence, delay of sexual relations, mutual fidelity and correct and consistent condom use. PSI's use of new media technologies such as low cost television and video production is an important supplementary tool to the one-on-one communication methods used to impart information. In many rural areas, these tools are enhanced by their novel nature.AIDSMark collaborates with USAID missions and other international donors, as well as with host governments, nongovernmental organizations, and commercial enterprises, to:

• Broaden current programs to include a wider range of products and services.
• Scale up programs to reach additional target groups and to intensify efforts within current target groups.
• Increase the capacity of programs in such areas as management, marketing, communications, research, and sustainability.
• Start new programs.

AIDSMark campaigns - which use mass media, peer education, school programmes, community theatre, mobile multi-media events, and training sessions - encourage healthy lifestyles and behaviours while communicating risks. The AIDSMark programmes also attempt to alter some social practices and to explode cultural myths and other barriers to condom use, often by enlisting local leaders and peers of high-risk populations. Examples of programmes, which are designed on the basis of the results of quantitative and qualitative research, include:

• The design, marketing, and dispersal of pre-packaged kits and syndromic case management via existing health-care service providers to treat male urethritis due to STIs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Education campaigns focusing on parent-child communication that address teenage girls with multiple or older partners.
• Operation Lighthouse - a drop-in centre in India for peer education in AIDS prevention, condom use, health risks to sex workers, and condom negotiation. Involves working with street magicians, taxi drivers, film stars, and bartenders to deliver messages to sex workers and their male clients on the streets.
• Youth programmes that include: Take It With You (Russia) - youth campaign promoting HIV prevention and condom use through a youth-oriented website; Youth Alert! (Malawi) - focuses on abstinence and safe sex through radio, telephone help lines, street theatre, and educational events at secondary schools; and Club Cool (Haiti) - 24 centres publish a youth magazine called Journal Jen Yo and sponsor concerts, parties, and discussion forums.
• The marketing of AIDSMark brand condoms - features pop stars and models and works to overcome cultural and other barriers to condom use by, for example, enlisting community leaders and using area-specific proverbs in posters. AIDSMark focuses on less traditional points of sale like bars, hotels, gas stations, and cinemas.

Observations

According to AIDSMark, the first four and a half years of the original agreement led to an increase in the monthly client flow in the VCT programme in Zimbabwe from 230 to 4,000. AIDSMark now has VCT programs in 14 countries. AIDSMark's pilot MTCT programme in Haiti began in March 2002 by testing 16 women; by May that number reached 400. In addition, AIDSMark assisted nine new countries in 2002: Bolivia, Bosnia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Croatia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mozambique and Nicaragua.

In the next five-year phase, AIDSMark continue to develop its MTCT and VCT marketing models. It will also refine communications strategies that address barriers to HIV/AIDS prevention on a regional or global basis. In Africa, for instance, AIDSMark is designing a pan-African campaign addressing key obstacles to behaviour change, such as trust in one's partner. Also planned is an assessment of male circumcision (MC) programmes in Western Kenya and Haiti, followed by a launching of two pilot MC programmes.

Partners: USAID, PSI, DKT International, Family Health International (FHI), International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Management Sciences for Health (MSH), Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH).

Source: Press release sent by David Olson to The Communication Initiative on July 1, 2002, and the PSI website.

For More Information Contact:

Population Services International (PSI)

1120 19th Street, NW

Suite 600

Washington, DC 20036

Tel.: (202) 785-0072

Fax: (202) 785-0120

info@psi.org