Residents of sub-Saharan Africa experience some of the world’s most pressing sexual and reproductive health challenges, including the world’s highest rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Training of the health workforce in countries like Tanzania is urgently needed in order to help address these challenges, yet until recently, much of the country’s health workforce of midwives, nurses, and doctors received no training in sexual healthcare delivery.

With a new grant from the National Institutes of Health, researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) will work to address this gap by refining and testing a curriculum in Tanzania that is focused on sexual health practices and can be replicated across sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world.

The current research builds on efforts SPH experts completed in earlier phases of their work in Tanzania, which included developing a tailored, Afrocentric sexual health curriculum aimed at the country’s healthcare workforce.

“In that first phase of this research, we effectively demonstrated that a sexual-health curriculum tailored to the local culture was effective over a short period of time,” SPH Professor and lead researcher Simon Rosser  says. “As we now move into the next phase, we’re going to study the training’s effectiveness over longer periods of time, enact a pilot program to train local faculty to deliver the curriculum, and then conduct a study to see if the curriculum produces the same results in “real world” conditions as it did in the earlier, more controlled study.

“If the study demonstrates that the curriculum effectively addresses sexual and reproductive health challenges over long periods of time and in real world conditions,” Rosser continued, “we will have the evidence and tools to disseminate this intervention across Tanzania, to other parts of Africa, and to other places around the world.”

Specifically, the study’s current phase has three aims:

• Evaluate the medium and long-term efficacy of the Afrocentric sexual-health curriculum. The researchers will conduct a randomized trial of the curriculum to assess the effects on sexual-health knowledge, attitudes, and sexual history in the medium- and long-term (six months and 12-24 months, respectively, after receiving the training).
• Develop the tools to disseminate the training curriculum across Tanzania. Researchers will disseminate the curriculum, hold faculty-training sessions, and develop online and in-person training resources
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the Afrocentric sexual health curriculum. To gauge the effectiveness of the curriculum in real-world settings, the researchers will conduct an observational study of the curriculum implemented at the two new sites in Tanzania.

The research is a collaborative effort between UMN SPH and Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), which is located in Tanzania.

The first phase of the current project will be completed in Fall of 2024. Results will be posted on clinicaltrials.gov twelve months after final data collection.