Globally, girls and women are at greater risk for HIV than their male counterparts, due in large part to an array of gender inequalities that negatively impact their mental and physical well being. In Tanzania, we see this illustrated through the culturally and socially ingrained expectations of women and the roles that they’re relegated to, and the ways that they’re unable to negotiate for safer sex.

In Newala specifically, the research we conducted through the Vitu Newala project helped us to uncover some of the challenges that adolescent girls face – namely the inability to decide when they have sex, with whom they have sex, and whether any sort of protection is used in those sexual encounters. We found that girls are all too often faced with the choice between giving in to unwanted sex or being raped. Additionally, because of their poor economic situation, many young girls end up being forced or coerced into transactional sex or sex with much older men. So, you can see how these things would put them at a great risk for HIV/AIDS, as well as other sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy.

Despite their vulnerability to HIV, adolescent girls remain an underserved population. We’ve seen that there is a lot of attention being given through programmes and interventions to the most vulnerable children under the age of twelve and to women, but there isn’t as much being done for these girls in the middle– these twelve-to-seventeen year-old girls – who are, in fact, at a very high risk of getting HIV.

The Vitu Newala project was designed to try to understand the specific vulnerabilities of adolescent girls in a very remote area of Tanzania where their susceptibility to HIV is heightened due to severely limited social protections. First, we aimed to identify exactly what the vulnerabilities were, and then work with the girls themselves and others in the communities to come up with a way to address them.

The project was designed to be participatory throughout – to involve the communities in identifying the root causes of the problem, recommending solutions and designing, leading and participating in intervention activities. It also aimed to empower adolescent girls at each stage of the project to advocate for and protect themselves.

Though we knew from the outset that Vitu Newala would be limited in reach and the number of issues it could address in the pilot period, in many ways, the impact exceeded our expectations. We hoped that the project would empower the young women who participated, and also start to change the attitudes and beliefs of individual boys and adults in the community who took part– and it did. But it acted as a catalyst for broader change as well.

For the first time we saw adults and young people alike talking about some of the structures and practices in their communities that put young people at risk, and that heighten young girls’ vulnerability to HIV. These conversations led to changes in policy and socially accepted practices, something we did not necessarily anticipate from this relatively brief pilot intervention.

For example, video parlours, discos and traditional initiation ceremonies were all identified by girls as places where they felt very much at risk. While our project did not set out to intentionally change rules governing video parlours and discos, or to change practices around the traditional initiation ceremonies, the conversations that ensued from Vitu Newala led to decisions within these communities to put in place bylaws and change practices in order to present a few more layers of protection for young women.