AIDSMark website
Welcome
   
   
   
Manual
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
hapter 9
Case Studies
India
Nigeria
Sample materials
Training Manuals
Peer Education
High Risk Groups
Operation Lighthouse

Chapter 5: Step 2: Strategic Design (Continued)

Deciding on Program Activities

Results from the formative research and other community assessments should allow you to make decisions about the structure of your activities. The following questions provide examples of the types of decisions that can be made.

  1. Do you want to use small group discussions, individual-level interactions, or a combination?
  2. Which population group will you target? What is the age-range of this group?
  3. Will you focus activities on target group influencers or other groups in target groups' social networks?
  4. Where does your target group socialize or work? How will you reach them? Will you go to them, or will you bring them to a central location?
  5. What messages are important? What services should you establish or promote?
  6. Are IPCs or PEs best equipped to liaise with target group members?
  7. What combination of channels will you use? Which IPC techniques? What materials need to be developed?
  8. How often will you conduct outreach? How frequently will your messages change?
  9. How will you monitor and evaluate the impact of your program? How will the geographic boundaries of the intervention impact the M&E plan? What changes do you want to make in the knowledge, attitudes, behavior, or risk perception of target group members? What measurable indicators will you use to track these changes?

Although not all of these questions may be applicable to your IPC program, these are the types of decisions you will have to make in order to decide on program activities. The appendices of this manual contain a number of IPC program examples. These provide a reference as to how others have designed IPC activities.
   

The Popular Opinion Leaders Approach in Romania

PSI/Romania is adopting an innovative technique to working with MSM, Roma Males, and Youth aged 15-25. Rather than using traditional IPCs or PEs, they are using a Popular Opinion Leader approach. This strategy takes advantage of social diffusion by relying on community opinion leaders to disseminate messages among a target group to effect behavior change. Qualitative ethnographic approaches are used to identify these opinion leaders, or influential members of the target population, who are subsequently trained in IPC techniques specific to the behavior change strategy at hand. Experience using this approach in the US has shown that once a sufficient number of opinion leaders have been trained, a tipping point is reached and behavior change is triggered in the larger population. Generally, this has been implemented as a venue-specific intervention (e.g. within brothels or bars where the target group may gather), and has been shown to be successful with marginalized groups such as MSM.


< <  Program Objectives  |  Partners, Timeline, Budgets  > >

 

^ Back to top
Download PDF