Combined HIV prevention? Systematic review of interventions with women from low- and middle-income countries

Abstract

The scope of this systematic review was to characterize interventions for HIV prevention that included adult women and was conducted in low- and middle-income countries after 1996, identifying how they covered individual, social and programmatic vulnerabilities. Databases were accessed from 1997 to July 2016 and the studies selected included adult women, with combined strategies or otherwise, only excluding biomedical or mass media interventions. Thus, 72 interventions developed in 32 countries were selected, most of them in African countries and/or in the upper-middle income bracket, with 26 focusing solely on women. Among the 64 interventions that evaluated results in behavioral, psychosocial and biomedical knowledge on HIV/STI and use of health services, 62 reported positive results, but also of no-effect (n = 52). Few of them reported a reduction in HIV/STI incidence (n = 9), in partner numbers (n = 12) and in stigma and violence reports (n = 7). The content analysis of the interventions revealed that the majority (n = 51) considered only individual vulnerabilities. The need to strengthen preventive approaches targeting structural determinants of the epidemic, encompassing the social contexts of women in a relational and intersectional perspective of vulnerabilities was discussed.