Good Practice for Sex Workers' Participation

in Biomedical HIV Prevention Trials 

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Final Programmatic Report - click here

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This is a wiki.

A wiki is like a website, and like a bulletin board, and like a filing cabinet.

This wiki is in support of SWGPP, a global community-based consultation coordinated by the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York.

For this SWGPP consultation, the Sex Workers Project will partner with global, regional and local sex worker networks.

SWGPP reached out to sex worker networks to  solicit their perspectives on good practice for sex workers participation in biomedical HIV prevention trials.

Background: In the Autumn of 2006, the UNAIDS Secretariat assisted by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) formed a Working Group to develop a core document outlining gudelines for good participatory practice for biomedical HIV prevention trials.

The starting point was that successful HIV prevention trials depend on strong and mutually-respectful relationships between researchers and research subjects and other involved individuals and communities.

Because in the absence of effective partnerships, HIV prevention trials may not succeed.

For many sex workers, the highly politicised halting of pre-exposure prophylaxis trials in 2004-2005 was a vivid demonstration of how problematic participatory practice between researchers and communities can affect the conduct and outcomes of HIV prevention trials.  

Recently a set of guidelines for creating effective partnerships for HIV prevention trials was released by UNAIDS and AVAC.  

These guidelines are not meant to provide specific answers for each trial site and each context - that would be impossible - but they are meant to provide some foundation for locally-driven processes able to address critical questions and issues.

The original consultation involved only a small number of people. In 2008-2009, AVAC provided funding for a series of 10 small projects. These projects each explored and considered the guidelines in ways meaningful to their community.

As one of the 10 projects funded, SWGPP received US $10,000 to help facilitate broader consultation and  consideration of some of the critical questions and issues the original guidelines may hold for sex workers, the scientists they work with, and their respective communities.

Learn more about the SWGPP consultation goals and objectives

Look at the project's recruitment emails and questionaires 

Read Sherry Arnstein's A Ladder of Citizen Participation

See the list of companion projects funded by AVAC

Visit the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, or UNAIDS' Key population page on sex workers and clients

Contact Dan Allman and Melissa Ditmore for more information on the SWGPP consultation