PSI mobile outreach visit

Dr. Marc D’Elbée, May 2016

The purpose of this visit was to appreciate the New Start centre activities in rural Zimbabwe. The LSHTM economics team, Dr. Fern Terris-Prestholt and I, with Collin Mangenah from CESHHAR Zimbabwe and Miriam Mutseta from Population Services International (PSI) met with Sylvia Madakadze, working at the New Start centre.

This PSI mobile outreach provides with HIV testing services as well as family planning services. They will be one of the points of access for the HIV oral self-test kits distribution. During this visit we were able to better understand the procedure by which people get tested for HIV.

This is particularly relevant to our work as economists, not only in order to evaluate the costs of current HIV testing activities but also to estimate how cost-effective the introduction of HIV self-tests via this channel could be.