Research | The Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University

GHDonline Panel Discussion “Turning off the Tap”

HIV Prevention Community Launch

With Special Guests from the Gates’ Foundation

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

For every 100 people put on HIV treatment, another 250 are newly infected. As the global recession reduces resources for treatment, the importance of strengthening HIV prevention efforts is becoming even more apparent. While continued investments in vaccines provide hope for a powerful solution, applying existing knowledge and strategies in the right combination and target populations could profoundly impact the epidemic, averting approximately half of all HIV infections projected to occur between now and 2015. With funding for HIV treatment declining, there is an urgent need to invest in building better models to deliver HIV prevention and scaling up effective services.

In response to this growing need, the GHD Project is launching a new HIV Prevention community on GHDonline.org, a platform for dialogues promoting more effective programming on the ground, with a kick-off Expert Panel Discussion in the community on May 25, 2010.

In recent years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in biomedical tools like vaccines and microbiocides and programs with an integrated approach to HIV prevention, and is leading the charge in many countries. In India, the Gates Foundation’s Avahan Initiative has mobilized marginalized communities, including commercial sex workers and injection drug users, to reduce their risk by practicing safer sex and injection methods, and through collective action against structural risks. In China, the Gates Foundation recently launched another HIV prevention initiative to determine the appropriate mix of strategies for reducing risks. Programs supported in Africa include some of the largest efforts to date — former Gates’ grantee loveLife, now South Africa’s national HIV prevention program for youth, is the largest HIV prevention program in a country with 5.7 million people living with HIV and a prevalence rate of 18.3%, and the African Comprehensive HIV and AIDS Partnership (ACHAP) in Botswana has set a national scale-up of male circumcision as one of its priorities.

On Tuesday, May 25, Aparajita Ramakrishnan, MBA, Senior programme officer, Matangi Jayaram, Programme Officer, and Sema Sgaier, PhD, MA, Programme Officer and others from the Gates’ Foundation will share their first-hand knowledge of these efforts in the HIV prevention community on GHDonline.org. Members will have the opportunity to discuss with these representatives what works in HIV prevention and what can be done to create and maintain effective programs at scale.

It’s easy to join the launch event:

If you are not a member of GHDonline.org, please click here to join the new HIV Prevention Community with “Per Post” email notification so that you can join the online debate right away (free)!
If you already are a member of GHDonline.org, simply go to your profile and check “HIV Prevention” in your communities and notification settings and click on “Submit.”
Then post a question, share your experience and information either online in the community or via email: hivprevention@ghdonline.org on or by May 25.

As part of GHD’s Strategies for Scale: Paths to Sustainability research, our team had the opportunity to spend time in the field with Mrs. Vyas, who is Director of Mukta — Pathfinder International’s HIV prevention project that is funded via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Avahan India AIDS Initiative.

Through targeted interventions for female sex workers, men who have sex with men, and other high risk groups throughout Maharashtra, india, the Mukta project provides HIV prevention services that address the clinical, social, and political risk environments in which these vulnerable and often hidden communities live and work.

The program’s innovative tools for community leadership and participation in the large-scale program’s agenda-setting, as well as monitoring and evaluation activities, offer promising lessons for large-scale HIV prevention. “Mukta,” a name chosen by the project’s community members, means “liberated” in the local Marathi dialect in Maharashtra. Please join us for a presentation on:

Community leadership in large scale HIV prevention:
Micro-planning by peer educators for service delivery and monitoring
An experience from Maharashtra, India

Darshana Vyas, MSW, MPH
Project Director
Mukta Project, Pathfinder International
Pune, Maharashtra

Wednesday, May 19^th 2010
12:00- 1:30 PM

641 Huntington Avenue, 1^st floor
Boston, MA

Lunch will be served

Please email us for more information.

Darshana Vyas is the Project Director for the Mukta/Pathfinder International Project in India, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through their Avahan Project. She is responsible for the overall vision, leadership, implementation, oversight, administration, supervision, and management of the Mukta project. She has worked in the field of HIV for the past 27 years, and has managed programs across Asia, Central Asia and Africa. She has worked in post-conflict countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Chad, Rwanda and DRC. In her last assignment, she worked as Chief of Party to manage USAID’s “Sudan Health Transformation Project,” and assisted the South Sudan government to develop their national HIV prevention and Reproductive & Child Health policies. She worked for 10 years as Director of Health Programs at Counterpart International in Washington, DC, where she was responsible for managing the organization’s HIV/AIDS, Reproductive Health and Maternal & Child Health programs in South East and Central Asia, the Pacific Islands, NIS and Africa. Mrs. Vyas received her Masters in Social Work from Gujarat, and her Masters in International Health from UNC Chapel Hill.