hotel Abuja by the Government of Nigeria
The collaboration for HIV Prevention Options to Control the Epidemic (CHOICE) is an eighteen-month collaborative project funded by USAID, in partnership with PEPFAR, Meeting Targets and Maintaining Epidemic Control (EpiC) and John Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics (Jhpiego). The goal of this partnership is to address technical gaps and support national scale-up of antiretroviral-based HIV prevention products (referred to as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis or PrEP) in PEPFAR hosting countries through catalytic evidence generation, translation, and research utilization. CHOICE was implemented in Nigeria and three other countries (Kenya, Lesotho and Tanzania.)
Between June 2020 – December 2021, CHOICE has worked closely with the Government of Nigeria (GoN) and other critical stakeholders and throughout this period, they achieved remarkable milestones.
PrEP in Nigeria has been without a national coordination mechanism, as Partners provided services based on program design and donor requirements. CHOICE successfully conducted the first ever oral PrEP value chain situation analysis for Nigeria so as to better understand the context and challenges of PrEP roll out in the country. At the same time, the PrEP subcommittee was reactivated and expanded to a national PrEP Think Tank which reviewed the Nigerian clinical guidelines amongst other functions. With its enrolment in the West Africa Regional PrEP Learning Network through CHOICE, Nigeria overwhelmingly dominated the committee of learning and also presented its innovations in PrEP service provision. The project was able to build national capacity on forecasting and costing for PrEP commodities and developed the following first ever national PrEP documents; a 2-year Oral PrEP Implementation Plan, Training resource, Data Collection Tools and SOPs. Using the Human Centered Design approach (HCD-lite), CHOICE developed materials for a national demand creation and communication campaign: Gen-N for Adolescent Girls and Young People (AGYP).
