Abstract
Abstract : Background: Despite effective biomedical tools, HIV remains the largest cause of morbidity/mortality in South Africa – especially among adolescents and young people. We used community-based participatory research (CBPR), informed by principles of social justice, to develop a peer-led biosocial intervention for HIV prevention in KwaZulu- Natal (KZN). Methods: Between March 2018 and September 2019 we used CBPR to iteratively co-create and contextually adapt a biosocial peer-led intervention to support HIV prevention. Men and women aged 18–30 years were selected by community leaders of 21 intervention implementation areas (izigodi) and underwent 20 weeks of training as peernavigators. We synthesised quantitative and qualitative data collected during a 2016–2018 study into 17 vignettes illustrating the local drivers of HIV. During three participatory intervention development workshops and community mapping sessions, the peer-navigators critically engaged with vignettes, brainstormed solutions and mapped the components to their own izigodi. The intervention components were plotted to a Theory of Change which, following a six-month pilot and process evaluation, the peer-navigators refined. The intervention will be evaluated in a randomised controlled trial (NCT04532307). © The Author(s). 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * Correspondence: