Leveraging social and sexual networks to reach young men with HIV testing and linkage services

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Investigator: Gabriel Chamie, MD
Sponsor: University of Pennsylvania

Location(s): South Africa

Description

This collaboration with Harsha Thirumurthy, PhD at the University of Pennsylvania will use insights from behavioral economics and mHealth based interventions to promote HIV testing among young men in South Africa. Through the development of key partnerships with South African organizations, we plan to carry out a series of rapid tests of promising interventions to improve HIV prevention and treatment outcomes. Our approach will focus on conducting a series of short-duration pilots that identify promising approaches as well as implementation barriers that will either lead to ‘failing quickly’, should the interventions prove not successful, or larger-scale tests in which both the ideas and the implementation approach are refined. Our long term goal is to develop a large-scale RCT based on the findings from our pilot testing.