Documenting and Tracking Risk Behaviors
With support from USAID/Madagascar, FHI is providing technical assistance to the national government and project partners working to implement a national behavior surveillance survey (BSS). This BSS will provide the national government and nongovernmental organizations with baseline information that can be used to develop HIV/AIDS prevention and care and support activities to meet the needs of the population. Learn more about FHI's approach to designing and implementing a BSS.
Operational Research
FHI has helped Madagascar to:
- identify appropriate and effective STI screening and treatment strategies for female sex workers.
- evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of STI treatment programs for female sex workers that provided services in partnership with the women themselves.
- use qualitative methods to identify opportunities to improve STI/HIV prevention and control among sex workers at systemic and individual levels.
STI Treatment Guidelines and Services
FHI collaborated with the Ministry of Health, sex worker associations, and clinicians to develop new national guidelines for STI treatment among female sex workers. These guidelines were based on the empirical and qualitative data from FHI's operations research. Recommendations for community-based intervention strategies for sex workers were also developed and FHI assisted policy makers in implementing these new strategies.
FHI worked with the Diego-Suarez Health District authorities and local representatives of the National AIDS Control Program to improve STI care for women. This project worked in close collaboration with the local peer education program, also based in Diego-Suarez, to improve common perceptions of services and care-seeking behaviors.
Communication Through Peers to Reduce Risk
FHI provided technical and program support to FIVMATA, a local sex worker education association, to implement a peer education program in the northern provincial capital of Diego-Suarez. The program combined preventive and curative care and involved members of the target audience in all project activities, which included:
- Behavior change interventions to promote regular preventive and curative visits to the public STI clinic, information sharing on the symptoms and transmission of common STIs, HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention, condoms and life skills, and creating educational materials in the local dialect, designed specifically for sex workers.
- Interventions to improve service delivery by training clinicians in STI/HIV/AIDS counseling techniques and assisting the local STI clinical management committee in implementing the new STI treatment guidelines.
- Research initiatives to evaluate care-seeking behavior, client behavior and needs, and sex worker population estimations for Diego-Suarez.
