Prevention of HIV infection among adolescents and young people in South Kivu: challenges and prospectives
Background : It’s worldwide established that interventions to combat HIV are being carried out, but most of them target adults and leave out adolescents and young people, who constitute one of the most exposed sections of the population.Methods : A cross-sectional and qualitative study on prevention of HIV among adolescent and young people conducted from 15 and 30 June 2019 in seven health zones of South Kivu in the democratic republic of Congo. All interviews and focus groups were transcribed in full, the obtained corpus; a thematic manual analysis was carried out.Results : Several stakeholders are involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS among adolescents and young people, in spite, available services are not sufficiently accessible to adolescents and young people due to many constraints: political, organisational, legal, economic-financial, socio-cultural and religious. Prevention services for adolescents and young people are, according to them, inadequate, insufficient and not user-friendly.Conclusions: Stakeholders should use findings of this study as a basis for reflection for the implementation of more effective interventions for adolescents and young people to reverse the current trend of the HIV epidemic in South Kivu province.