| In the News |
| AIDS project to pay people to avoid unsafe sex |
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A World Bank-funded project in Tanzania hopes that a combination of counselling and cash incentives will create awareness about safe sex |
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A controversial World Bank-funded project will pay people to avoid unsafe sex, in another attempt at halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. The trial project, which is expected to cost $ 1.8 million, will be launched in 2008 in Tanzania. It consists of counselling, on the one hand, and payment on the other. Around 3,000 men and women aged between 15 and 30 years will be counselled over three years and will be paid on condition that periodic laboratory tests prove that they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections. Certain participants will not be offered payment, in order to track the effects of the programme more precisely. The proposed payment is $ 45, which is estimated to be a quarter of the annual income that some of the participants earn. The programme is jointly funded by the World Bank, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Population Reference Bureau and the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund. The study will be conducted by the Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre in Tanzania, in conjunction with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Francisco, and the World Bank. AIDS claims 2 million lives every year. There were an estimated 2.5 million new cases of HIV in 2007. The system of paying money or ‘conditional cash transfer’ is not new. It has been used in Latin American countries to get poor families to attend health clinics and have their children vaccinated. In India, incentives in kind have been used to further the family planning programme. Carol Medlin from the University of California, San Francisco, one of the researchers, says: “We hope this ‘reverse prostitution’ will make people think hard about the long-term consequences of their short-term behaviour.” Source: The Financial Times, April 2008 |