Promoting Partner Reduction: Helping Young People Understand and Avoid HIV Risks from Multiple Partnerships

"Multiple sexual partnerships are a major driver of the HIV epidemic, and yet this topic is inadequately covered in HIV prevention curricula for young people."

Designed to supplement other programmes on sexuality education or HIV prevention, this set of activities addresses multiple partnerships, with an emphasis on those that are overlapping or concurrent (sometimes referred to as "multiple concurrent partnerships", or MCPs). It contains a set of evidence-informed and participatory units designed to positively affect young people's knowledge, attitudes, values, refusal skills, and intention to reduce their number of sexual partners and avoid having concurrent partners.

According to FHI 360, which created this toolkit with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Promoting Partner Reduction goes beyond the simple message of "avoid multiple partners to protect oneself from HIV" and encourages participants to think about the reasons young people give for having multiple partnerships, different patterns of multiple partnerships, and the impact that such partnerships have on the entire community. Field-tested in Kenya, Botswana, and the United States (US) among youth ages 13 to 24, the participatory activities in the resource are organised around 5 stand-alone units (yet each unit builds on the one prior, culminating in young people's intention to change their MCP-related behaviour):

1. Understanding the Risks of Multiple Partnerships, which aims to increase young people's knowledge about differences between sequential and concurrent partnerships and the increased risks associated with all multiple partnerships.
2. Countering Concurrent Partnerships, which aims to affect young people's values and attitudes about concurrent partnerships and encourage them to think of alternative ways of meeting their needs without having concurrent partners.
3. Creating Media Broadcasts to Promote Monogamous Relationships, which aims to positively affect values and attitudes about reasons for being committed to one partner.
4. Practicing Skills to Avoid Multiple Partnerships, which aims to reinforce refusal skills for avoiding multiple partners.
5. Making a Commitment to a Monogamous Relationship, which aims to help positively affect young people's intentions and skills by encouraging them think about what it would be like to make a commitment to only one partner and then defend that decision.

Each unit begins with an overview, a list of key facts, and a suggested time for each activity (between 2 and 6 activities). Discussion questions are provided throughout the activities to encourage more in-depth conversation about the unit topics and to address issues related to special populations and other relevant circumstances. Tips for facilitators are provided. For example: "Within each activity, facilitators will notice a graphic that indicates a gender-related question. Answers to these questions are generally not provided in this resource because gender norms vary across and within countries. However, these questions should be used to identify gender norms and discuss how to best counter those that are harmful." Each unit concludes with a wrap-up activity with optional "take-home messages" and ideas for facilitators, such as asking each participant to identify one person with whom they will share their take-home message.

In addition to a glossary, supplementary MCP resources are provided for facilitators who believe that their participants would benefit from more activities or other media, such as video.