Save the Children's (SC/US) Viet Nam field office in conjunction with a local NGO partner, SHAPSI, is exploring fresh ways to address the growing problem of HIV/AIDS in Viet Nam. While there are various risk factors with HIV/AIDS; prevention strategies are rooted in behavior change. The Positive Deviance approach was used to identify uncommon behaviors or practices of those few PD individuals high-risk environment and within the context of the given problem. That in spite of being least advantaged in a high-risk environment, who have no access to special resources, have somehow managed to find solutions and strategies that have help them succeed. PD has been widely and successfully applied to nutrition in Viet Nam. This application to HIV/AIDS may be the first of its kind.
SC/US and SHAPSI conducted a three day workshop in Lang Son, January 2002 to train 11 peer educators (PE), some living with HIV/AIDS, and to conduct a Positive Deviance Inquiry (PDI) to inform HIV/AIDS programming. Six PEs had been or currently were commercial sex workers (CSW), and five had been or currently were injecting drug users (IDU). PD individuals were defined as: PD CSWs consistently used condoms, and PD IDUs always used clean syringes. PD individuals were identified in the community and then through PDI their specific practices that enabled the PD CSWs to always negotiate condom use and the PD IDUs to always secure and use clean syringes were discovered.
The following presentation illustrates the preliminary steps taken: Promising behaviors to mitigate HIV/AIDS in Viet Nam identified through the Positive Deviance Approach.
There are two versions of the workshop report available: