Reproductive Health and HIV

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HD3: Research and Capacity Building in Reproductive and Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries

Director: David Mabey, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/dfid/aids

Research and Capacity Building in Reproductive and Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries programme record

The purpose of this consortium is to support a research programme that will strengthen the evidence base to:

• Enable policy makers to identify and prioritise interventions that will improve reproductive and sexual health and reduce HIV incidence among economically poor populations in Africa and Asia;
• Ensure that the results of the research are made available to policy makers at national and international levels in an intelligible and relevant form;
• Strengthen research capacity in partner institutions in developing countries to ensure that the programme is sustainable.

The RPC will be co-ordinated by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and will be a collaboration with the following institutions:

• National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), Mwanza, Tanzania
• Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC), and School of Medical Sciences of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana
• Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit (RHRU), University of Witwatersrand, Republic of South Africa
• Medical Research Council's Social and Public Health Sciences Unit (MRC SPSHU), Glasgow, UK
• International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)
• Population Services International (PSI).

The RPC will focus mainly on Tanzania, Ghana, and South Africa representing various levels of the HIV epidemic in Africa, and on India and Cambodia, where there are more concentrated epidemics but large numbers of people at risk.

The greatest strength of this new Consortium is its ability to bring a wide range of disciplines, including epidemiology, health economics, modelling, social, clinical and microbiological sciences, to bear on a particular problem. The inclusion of two major international NGOs will ensure that the results of the research will be translated into policy and practice on a global scale.