Hesperian Health Guides
Working for Change
Contents
To help prevent HIV
In the community
- Make sure everyone has access to HIV information, HIV testing, ART, and sexual health services, including condoms, STI testing, counseling and PrEP where it is available.
- Educate people about why different people are at risk for becoming infected, such as girls, young women, and transgender people. Help people see that HIV has roots in poverty and in many people’s inability to protect themselves in their sexual relationships.
- Train peer educators. When girls, women, and transgender people work as peer educators, they can help others in their communities understand their bodies and sexuality, and gain the self-confidence and skills to negotiate safer sex.
- Use theater and media to help women and others feel it is OK to know about, talk about, and prevent HIV. For example, use a play or comic book to show that “good” girls (or homosexual boys or men) can discuss HIV with their partners or can buy condoms and ask their boyfriends to use them. At the same time, you can show different ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman. Help people question the idea that men should have many sex partners and that women should be passive about sex. Show how these ideas are dangerous to people’s health.
- Help parents, teachers, and other adult role models become more comfortable talking about sex and HIV with young people.
- Bring education about HIV and free condoms to community meeting places—bars, schools, sports events, markets, and military bases.
More Information
sexual healthEvery generation of young people needs to learn the benefits of using condoms.
Women working together against HIV—with a “sex strike”
The women of Palestina, a small town in northeastern Brazil, learned that a man infected with HIV had unsafe sex with at least two women in the town. After talking together, they decided to stop having sex with their husbands and boyfriends. They demanded that their partners get tested for HIV before they would begin to have sex again and then insisted upon safer sex practices.
The women continue to ask for safer sex and proof of an HIV test before they have sex with a partner. One woman said, “If he won’t practice safer sex, we won’t go together anymore.”
For community strategies to prevent HIV, see Hesperian’s book Health Actions for Women.
If you are a health worker
- Include HIV education, testing, and care in broader health services—in general health clinics, pregnancy care, and family planning programs. Give information to every person you see about how HIV spreads and does not spread—especially if they have other STIs. Encourage anyone having sex to use condoms, even if they are using another form of family planning.
- Make health services friendly and accessible to more people in your community. Think about where and when health services can best serve young people, sex workers, sexual minorities, and people who inject drugs. Be sure health services are private and confidential.
- Use precautions against HIV infection every time you have to cut the skin or touch body fluids. This includes whenever you give an injection, stitch skin or tissue, help with childbirth, or examine someone’s genitals. Follow the advice on page 295.
- Invite someone from a regional HIV or AIDS organization to meet with health workers in your area. They can help you learn how to treat infections that people with HIV might get.
- Discuss the problems that people with HIV and AIDS face. Think about how you can help people using the resources you have and where you might find more resources to help meet people’s needs. If health workers can work together to get more resources, they will not have to confront this problem alone.
When health workers join forces with families and other community members, they have more power. They may be able to advocate for more effective and supportive health services for everyone with HIV, including people whose needs are often not considered. For example, mobile services could be offered for those who cannot get to the health center. When new staff are hired, these could include people from minority communities.
To provide effective treatment, clinics also need to have enough medicines and supplies. Community mobilization can help make this happen. Working together can also increase activities at health centers, such as support groups, health talks, needle-exchange programs, food distribution, community vegetable gardens, or a play space for children in the waiting area.