Thursday, April 25, 2024
4/25/2024
South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world, accounting for 20% of the global population of PLHIV. Over the past 10 years, the country has made significant progress in its AIDS response. HIV incidence has declined by 25% over the last 4 years, but remains high – at 270,000, particularly among high-risk populations. Among the populations most vulnerable to HIV, 15-24 year old AGYM account for more than 100,000 new HIV infections – a rate greater than 2,000 per week . The country’s National Strategic Plan for HIV also identifies men aged 23-35 as “high HIV incidence”. It is these men who are engaging in unprotected and often transactional sex with females on average 8-years younger, who place AGYW at such high risk of HIV transmission. Shout-it-Now (S-N) seeks to continue its longstanding support to South Africa’s ambitious 95-95-95 UNAIDS targets by providing Innovative HIV Prevention Services to Achieve Epidemic Control Among High Risk South Africans. Using HTS, active social media engagement (mPrevention), and capacity building relationships with key stakeholders as the gateways to reaching priority populations, S-N will target AGYW, MSP and families with an innovative mix of structural, behavioral and biomedical prevention interventions. Building on our 11 years of experience in providing HIV prevention services in RSA, we propose a comprehensive prevention program for the 11 priority districts identified by this NOFO that utilizes our highly engaging HTS service as the primary gateway to other comprehensive prevention services that we will deliver. We propose to run three programs at scale and to coordinate these distinct programs to identify and link AGYW, MSP and families to appropriate social, behavioral and biomedical prevention, treatment and care interventions to reduce new HIV infections and to improve the health, education and social outcomes of these populations: Strategy 1: S-N will implement three peer-led sexual education programs – Stepping Stones, Love Notes and Families Matter! Program– targeting 110,000 participants in Year 1 that together aim to address the biggest drivers of HIV for AGYW, MSP and boys. Additional prevention services will include: PrEP, post-violence care, TB testing, STI screening, condom provision, and VMMC referral. To recruit participants, we propose leveraging our engagement of priority populations via HTS, and launching new mPrevention interventions. Strategy 2: S-N will deliver HTS as a gateway to link priority populations to all prevention interventions and our mPrevention program to mobilize clients and recruit prevention participants. The HTS program we propose for this project include our “Learner HTS” which will be deployed to test 90,000 AGYW and boys annually in schools, and our “SMART HTS” will be deployed to test 210,000 AGYW and MSP annually in communities. Strategy 3: S-N will provide Technical Assistance (TA) and capacity building amongst our partner clinics in the 11 high burden districts and to non-clinical partners (Thuthuzela Care Centers (TCCs), FBOs, NGOs and other PEPFAR partners) to improve the quality of youth friendly services being provided at the community level, and in the process build referral paths to our prevention services, thus accelerating the uptake of social and biomedical HIV prevention and SRH services by AGYW and their MSP.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
