Prevention Strategy for HIV

Amidst South Africa's escalating epidemic, its rapid social, economic and political transition, and the changing roles of the state, civil society and international actors, there emerge a multitude of complex and yet unanswered questions. My doctoral research, the larger backdrop for this scoping study, focuses on one such area: little is known about the dynamics of community-level mobilisation, nor about the interface between these groups and national and international bodies. This report investigates, in a preliminary way, one component within this - what is happening within South African ‘communities' and why?
Social mobilisation is a growing theme among AIDS researchers in southern Africa. Indeed, as we become increasingly weary of attempts to measure and predict ‘impact' (which could mean anything from macro-economic effects to psychological traumas), and as the promise of technological interventions (such as circumcision, microbicides and vaccines) inevitably begins to wane, some researchers are increasingly shifting their gaze to learn from what those most affected are doing every day to respond to HIV/ AIDS - a shift in focus from formulaic or sequential views of impact to understanding differentiated, creative, and perhaps unpredictable collective responses.

The Kenyan government has embarked on an ambitious national programme to fast track the national rollout of male circumcision as a means of preventing HIV. Results from three randomised controlled trials in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, in 2006 showed that following circumcision, the incidence of HIV infection was reduced in men by more than half. According to the new policy document, circumcision will be rolled out for males of all ages in a culturally sensitive way and in a clinically safe setting. The programme will involve some strengthening of the health infrastructure, but according to Peter Mutie, head of communications at the National AIDS Control Council (NACC), the existing health centres are sufficiently equipped for the rollout.