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Project Parivartan, which means "long-term change," as well as "metamorphosis," conducts research on implementing structural interventions among high-risk groups in six Indian states with the highest HIV prevalence: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Manipur, and Nagaland.
Structural interventions (SIs) in HIV prevention seek to alter social, economic, political and normative factors that make up the risk environments for HIV infection where individuals live and work, and community-led structural interventions (CLSI) involve mobilizing communities to develop and direct such structural interventions to reduce their own HIV risk, with particular emphasis on community participation and ownership.
Project Parivartan is funded by Avahan, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's (BMGF) AIDS Initiative in India. Initial funding was received in May 2004 to support CARE India India and other Avahan partners in:
- systematically documenting and analyzing the implementation of structural interventions (SIs) for sex workers (SWs) and their clients;
- systematically evaluating the impact at the individual, community and structural level, of SIs being implemented with SWs and their clients;
- conducting new situational analyses in collaboration with selected Avahan partners for the purposes of defining or recommending additional SIs or additional components to planned SIs for populations at high risk for HIV, which includes SWs and their clients, injection drug users, men who have sex with men, and mobile populations (e.g., truckers); and 4) providing methodological tools and frameworks for continued documentation and analysis of SIs.
The initial grant was for three years.
In October 2007, Project Parivartan received funds from Avahan to extend the project for three additional years. In addition to the above objectives, two new objectives were added:
- systematically assess the implementation of SIs that focus on changing policing policy and practices and analyze their impact on HIV among SWs in India; and
- systematically assess the implementation in India of SIs providing micro-credit and analyze their impact on HIV risk among SWs in India.
The Parivartan team is led by Principal Investigator Kim M. Blankenship, Associate Director of Yale's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS and Associate Research Scientist at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Blankenship will be joining the faculty of Duke University in May 2008 as Associate Research Professor, Department of Sociology and Duke Global Health Institute.
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