Project 459549

Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe have exceptionally many people who become infected with HIV, with a disproportionally high infection rate among teenage girls and young women who are 14 to 24 years old. It is necessary to design and improve programs that prevent HIV infection among them. I plan to improve HIV prevention programs in Kenya and Ukraine using a Program Science approach. Program Science is a way of collecting and analysing research data in collaboration with the people affected by the research, designing and implementing public health programs and evaluating them. I will analyse data that was collected among teenage girls and young women in Kenya and Ukraine, who tend to hang out in places where many of them find partners for transactional sex or sex work. This puts these girls and women at higher risk for HIV infection. I will find out which sexual and reproductive health services these girls and women use and I will discover which of them are less likely to access current available services. I will further compare the healthcare access of these girls and women who are at high risk for HIV infection with girls and women from the general population. I will work closely with partner programs, the ministries of health and non-governmental organizations in these countries to improve existing HIV prevention services and to develop new ones where required.