Starting this year, IntraHealth will collaborate with the University of Zambia’s School of Medicine to adopt and scale up the Prevention with Positives (PWP) program to four of Zambia’s nine provinces: Eastern, Western, Southern and Lusaka provinces. Prevention with Positives empowers people living with HIV to protect their own health and avoid passing on the virus. Through this program, people living with HIV learn about sex-related risks, reproductive choices, antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, condom use, sexually transmitted infections and alcohol abuse.

Two IntraHealth staff members will work as trainers with the provinces and other partners. IntraHealth will involve local leadership in the program to strengthen community mobilization and sensitization sessions on HIV prevention. These activities will expand the provinces’ capacity to deliver PWP programs and to integrate related health care activities, such as preventive counseling and testing, prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, tuberculosis testing and treatment, and ART.  

IntraHealth will work with local agencies for people living with HIV to conduct workshops on strategies for healthy living and transmission prevention. Workshop trainees will conduct similar discussions in their communities. Prevention strategies will also be shared with individuals who do not know their HIV status.* IntraHealth will work with a public health officer to hold further training at each district hospital in the four provinces. This officer will hire field staff to conduct meetings on how to make the program more efficient and effective; IntraHealth will also collect and share data with which to evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

PWP was developed by the Global AIDS Alliance and their community partners, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The University of Zambia’s School of Medicine initiated PWP work in 2008. Further information on PWP is available here.

_{*Another IntraHealth project is working to increase the number of Zambians who are tested for HIV.}