JasSpark project – Crowdsourcing to Reduce HIV Stigma & Increase Adolescent & Young Adult HIV testing (2021 – 2023)
Funding: Fogarty International Center
Grant amount: 265’976 USD
The project goal: This project sought to increase HIV testing among adolescents and young adults in Kazakhstan through a crowdsourced approach.
Project Description: This project is evaluating whether a crowdsourced intervention can reduce HIV stigma and increase access to HIV self-testing among adolescents and young adults in Kazakhstan. This work will result in crowdsourced materials on HIV stigma reduction and HIV testing that can be further used for adolescents and young adults in Kazakhstan.
The project results: As a result, crowdsourcing materials for stigma reduction and HIV testing were created, which can be further used for adolescents and young people in Kazakhstan. As a result of the announced national open crowdsourcing competition, we received 96 entries from 76 young people from all over Kazakhstan. Multimedia materials from the winning entries were combined into an intervention package for a randomized control trial. In the control and intervention groups, 216 participants underwent a pre-intervention assessment. At pre-intervention and two months post-intervention, participants in the intervention group reported significantly greater reductions in HIV testing stigma than participants in the control group. Participants in the intervention group were marginally more likely to order an HIV self-test kit within three months of the pre-intervention assessment than participants in the control group.
Publications:
- A citizen science approach to develop a digital intervention to reduce HIV stigma and promote HIV self-testing among adolescents and young adults: a mixed methods analysis from Kazakhstan (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39030847/).