Welcome to the USAID-funded Health Policy Plus (HP+) project website.
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The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR’s) Annual Report to Congress features the Gender and Sexual Diversity (GSD) blended learning package. The training package is designed to help PEPFAR improve its effectiveness at serving its most vulnerable populations with a focus on staff training. Health Policy Plus and PEPFAR built on the success of a series of in-country trainings to develop the GSD blended learning package, which includes online and in-person training components. All PEPFAR field and headquarters staff are required to spend 90 minutes participating in the online interactive curriculum. All staff must also join an in-person panel discussion with local gender and sexual minority representatives around HIV, human rights, and meaningful engagement of GSD in PEPFAR programming. Thus far, more than 400 PEPFAR field and headquarters staff have taken the online training.
The Health Policy Project, the predecessor to HP+, with funding from PEPFAR provided Gender and Sexual Diversity trainings for 2,825 participants including PEPFAR staff and program implementers, U.S. government staff, and local stakeholders in 38 countries. Results from the first study to report on GSD attitude change among a global sample of almost 180 individuals from 33 countries were published in PLOS on September 19, 2017. The paper, Changing hearts and minds: Results from a multi-country gender and sexual diversity training, reports that attitudes toward gender and sexual minorities were more positive after the training compared to before the training. Additionally, positive attitudes toward gender and sexual minorities not only persisted 3 – 6 months after that training but improved even further. These changed attitudes were not only sustained for months after the training, but they were also associated with changes in the workplace and, to a lesser extent, HIV programming.