O Icheke (Break the Chain) Campaign

According to the campaign organisers, the rationale for a national campaign plan is to create common objectives, messages, and resources, communicated and leveraged in a genuinely national and multi-sectoral effort to address MCP and thus work towards the Vision 2016 of zero new infections. The process of developing the campaign plan was a multi-sectoral one, involving national and district-level policy-makers, managers, and implementers from across the public sector and civil society.

The messages of the O Icheke campaign address key factors that drive and motivate young women and adult men to engage in MCP. These include lack of knowledge about concurrency and HIV risk, as well as related calculations that individuals make about the costs and benefits of having multiple concurrent partners, consumerism, and gender, relationship, and peer-to-peer norms and values about sex and relationships. Another priority for the campaign is intergenerational sex involving older men who use their status to transact sex with young girls.

The campaign seeks to combine approaches that create individual desire to adopt and maintain safe behaviours and those that create enabling environments for sustained behaviour change. Consumer-centred messaging has been developed to promote the relevant benefits of behaviour change and support the values and norms that shape the lives of young women and adult men, so that they feel supported to avoid MCP. According to the organisers, throughout the campaign, messages are being developed and adapted to address the cultural dimensions of MCP. The popular local musician "Vs" is the brand ambassador of the campaign whose debut album "O Icheke" contains lyrics that address cultural norms, MCP, and cross-generational sex.

HIV/AIDS

The impetus for the campaign came after conducting a survey which revealed that approximately one-quarter of sexually active Batswana have reported that they have more than one partner at a time. MCP is recognised as a key driver of the HIV epidemic in Botswana.

Two priority populations intended to be reached by the campaign were identified as the focus of generalised media and community mobilisation activities, based on the prevalence of MCP in these population segments and their susceptibility to behaviour change interventions. The first priority population is young women aged 18-24 years who engage in MCP with wealthier, usually older, men to satisfy a range of material needs and wants or to gain advancement in education and employment. The second priority group is men aged 25-34 years having affairs with women other than their primary partners for sexual variety. There is widespread, often tacit, acceptance that men need more than one woman to satisfy them sexually, with myths such as "mistresses/concubines strengthen relationships" and "man cannot live on bread alone" supporting this norm. These relationships often have a compensatory function, providing benefits that are lacking in a main partnership or relief from stress or boredom.

The third key focus of the campaign, particularly in media commentary and community debate, is the phenomenon of older men having sex with young girls, particularly in rural areas. The two populations engaged in this type of cross-generational sex are distinct from 18-24 year old women engaged in MCP for personal or material gain and men 25-34 engaged in MCP for sexual variety in two key respects: firstly, there are much larger differences in age and wealth between the girls and men; and, secondly, the girls are too young and/or poor to enter into these partnerships of their own volition and feel pressured to do so by the older men involved.