US funding for abstinence-until-marriage funding in Africa; Impact on efforts to reduce HIV

Beginning in 2004, the US government undertook a laudable goal of scaling up care, treatment and prevention in 15 countries experiencing significant challenges to stemming the tide of HIV/AIDS. Most (12) of these countries are in Africa and the others are Vietnam, Haiti and Guyana. While laudable, the current US policy has been perversely affected by politics and ideology, particularly on the issue of prevention. In 2006, SIECUS did a broad overview of the effects of an abstinence-until-marriage policy strictly enforced by the Bush Administration on 1/3 of all prevention funding. In 2007, we conducted a research trip to Vietnam to supplement this research. In 2008, we published an update to the broad overview of research and conducted a second field research trip to Zambia. This presentation will share the important findings from this research to document the harmful messages, human rights violations under international agreements, and impact this non-evidenced based approach is having on HIV prevention programming. The presentation of this policy analysis and qualitative date will be supplemented by a presentation of the increasing body of quantitative evaluation on this type of intervention. The timeliness of this presentation in important given the longevity and scale up of US funding in this area and the transition to a new Administration in 2009.