Implementing AIDS Prevention and Care (IMPACT) Project

The IMPACT Project supports USAID in its efforts to achieve the strategic objective of "increased use of improved, effective and sustainable responses to reduce HIV transmission and to mitigate the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic." It helps USAID maximise its HIV/AIDS resources by designing prevention and care programmes that promote best practices, implement cost-effective approaches, leverage resources from both the public and private sectors, and strengthen monitoring and evaluation.

IMPACT aims to reduce the risk of HIV transmission by addressing the factors that facilitate sexual and non-sexual transmission. Its strategy to reduce sexual transmission of HIV/AIDS includes behaviour change interventions (BCIs) that address personal, social, and contextual determinants of behaviour and interventions to improve the prevention and management of the sexually transmitted infections (STIs) that exacerbate HIV transmission. The organisers maintain, “Sustained change in individual behavior is unlikely unless there is also a change in relevant contextual factors. Therefore, IMPACT develops interventions at multiple levels of influence to encourage risk reduction for behavior change.”

IMPACT improves peer counselling, couple counselling and testing, and small group interventions. The interventions aim to motivate individuals to change HIV/AIDS risk behaviour by influencing knowledge, attitudes, perceived norms, and safer-sex skills. They are reinforced by initiatives at the societal level, such as mass media campaigns and school and workplace interventions which mobilise communities to provide a supportive environment for reducing risk.

The project organisers identified environmental and structural constraints to behaviour change and advocated methods to eliminate or alleviate these barriers. They educate policymakers about how to address the access people have to reproductive health information and believe that providing services for youth is an essential method of reducing risk for that population.

HIV/AIDS

IMPACT works in partnership with governments and non-governmental organisations to develop, implement, assess, and refine programming for:

• Behaviour change communication to reduce HIV transmission through sex and drug use
• Voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) for HIV
• Preventing, diagnosing, and treating sexually transmitted infections
• Clinical management of HIV, including antiretroviral therapy (ART), and TB
• Care and support of people living with HIV/AIDS and their families
• Preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV
• Supporting orphans and vulnerable children
• Blood safety
• NGO support and development
• Participatory planning and community mobilization at the district, province, and national levels
• Planning an expanded and comprehensive response
• Reducing transmission from drug use

The project organisers say IMPACT devised a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, multisectoral approach to reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS by facilitating behavioural and social change at four levels:

• Individual beliefs and motivations
• Societal attitudes and norms
• Health services infrastructure
• Policy, legal, and human rights environments