[Kenya] Cheap solutions cut AIDS toll for poor Kenyan youths

from The Detroit News

Celia W. Dugger / New York Times

At a time when millions of people each year are still being infected with the virus that causes AIDS, particularly in Africa, a rigorous new study has identified several simple, inexpensive methods that helped reduce the spread of the disease among Kenyan teenagers, especially girls.

In Kenya, where poverty drives some girls to sleep with older men for money or gifts, teenage girls are seven times more likely to be HIV positive than boys the same age.

The new study found that when informed that older men are much likelier to be infected, teenage girls were far less likely to become pregnant by so-called sugar daddies.

The $1 million study, financed by the Partnership for Child Development, a London-based nonprofit group, did not seek blood tests for HIV, since its subjects were minors. Instead, it relied on pregnancy as evidence of unprotected sex.

The study found that when girls in impoverished rural areas were given free school uniforms instead of having to pay $6 for them -- the principal remaining economic barrier to education in Kenya -- they were significantly less likely to drop out and become pregnant.

Researchers also found that classroom debates and essay-writing contests on whether students should be taught about condoms to prevent the spread of HIV increased the use of condoms without increasing sexual activity.

The methods, identified by economists affiliated with the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offer a splash of good news in an often bleak landscape. "I was very reluctant to get involved in this, because I thought nothing would work," said Michael Kremer, a Harvard economics professor who was on the lab's team. "I'm very happy to see some things are working."

The study was conducted over three years among 70,000 students in the sixth to eighth grades in 328 schools in Kenya.

In a recent telephone interview, Isaac Thuita, who leads the AIDS control unit in Kenya's Education Ministry, called the research "very relevant, very important."

A year after the researchers intervened, girls who had been given information about the greater risk of sex with older men were 65 percent less likely to have gotten pregnant by an adult partner.

"That intervention is very, very cheap and could be scaled up easily," said Esther Duflo, an economics professor at MIT and a member of the research team.