It’s Tough to Stop Sex, Study of U.S. AIDS Effort Shows
A billboard on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda, in 2011 urges people to be faithful to their partners to stop the spread of HIV.
Photographer: Marc Hofer/AFP via Getty Images“Abstinence promotion” policies the United States has funded for more than a decade as part of an effort to slow the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa are largely ineffective, a new evaluation of the program concludes.
The U.S. has spent more than $1.4 billion since 2004 telling young people in Africa to abstain from sex before marriage and then commit to a single partner. That funding didn’t influence the number of sex partners people had, the age at which they started having sex, or teen pregnancy rates, according to a study published on Monday in the journal Health Affairs by researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine.