About DFID Research - Current Research Topics

HD 12: Social Context of HIV and AIDS (Addressing the Balance of Burden on AIDS – ABBA)

Director: Dr Dave Haran, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Addressing the Balance of Burden in HIV/AIDS

This RPC is helping DFID to drive forward its strategy for assisting countries to tackle HIV and AIDS. The goal is to improve the effectiveness of efforts to reduce poverty and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by lessening people’s vulnerability to HIV.

HIV threat is uneven across a population, and impacts differently on individuals, households and communities. Country policies sometimes ignore this unevenness. Although funding for HIV has increased dramatically, it has produced unequal benefits, and there is a danger of efforts at prevention being disconnected from those for treatment. HIV also threatens civil and government institutions (e.g. the health service, agricultural production and formal education sectors) necessary for poverty reduction, with consequent implications for development.

We assist governments in Africa to use research evidence about factors that influence the impact of HIV and AIDS on poor and vulnerable groups in order to provide greater benefits from programmes to tackle HIV in health, education and other sectors.

One important body of such evidence concerns the social, economic and institutional factors that place the livelihoods of vulnerable and neglected groups at increased threat from HIV and AIDS, and identify which institutions and programmes are best placed to alleviate those threats. Another, concerns the way in which HIV affects the very institutions and programmes that tackle HIV and other health problems.

The RPC agenda is to improve use of this evidence by policy makers, local programme implementers, representatives of vulnerable groups, and researchers so that better policies and programmes can be implemented for improving benefit to the poor and the vulnerable.

The countries the RPC will cover are Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, Swaziland and Uganda.

The RPC Partners are:

• Dr Dave Haran – Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (lead partner)
• Prof Alan Whiteside – Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD), South Africa
• Dr John Gyapong – Health Research Unit (HRU), Ghana
• Dr Kelly Hallman – Population Council, New York
• Dr John Mwesigwa – Regional AIDS Training Network (RATN), Kenya
• Ms Bertha Nhlema Simwaka – Research on Equity and Community Health (REACH), Malawi