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Mobile Populations |
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Extended or repeated overnight travel away from home and community is associated with HIV infection. This travel can be divided into three types: voluntary and job-related (truckers, traders, freelance sex workers); legally required (members of the military, deported immigrants); or coerced (political refugees, trafficked sex workers, those displaced due to war-related population shifts).
Work-related mobility often creates an imbalance in the ratio of women to men, which facilitates the sharing of sex partners. Extreme examples are truck stops where female sex workers, vendors and drink shop owners outnumber the men who may be passing through. The reverse is true in military and mining camps, where men greatly outnumber women.
Mobile populations that regularly cross international borders need access to a complete spectrum of HIV prevention options, including diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmitted infections (STI), affordable condoms and information on assessing, reducing and eliminating one's risk of infection.
Many settings with mobile populations especially need policy-focused, contextual interventions to foster individual behavior change. One approach to cross-border HIV prevention is to concentrate interventions at international border crossings because they are high-risk environments where national prevention programming is weak.
Our experience, and that of numerous other agencies conducting cross-border STI/HIV/AIDS prevention activities, shows the need for programs to:
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