The Drive to Take an HIV Test in Rural Uganda: A Risk to Prevention for Young People?

AbstractA key component of current global HIV prevention efforts is widespread HIV testing. This strategy in part reflects the focus on the broader global targets to eliminate AIDS by achieving high rates of viral suppression. In this chapter we look at young people’s engagement with HIV prevention options in South-West Uganda. Taking a qualitative approach, using repeat in-depth interviews and participatory workshops with 50 young people aged 16–24 years old, we reflect on their accounts of how they navigate risks and opportunities within their daily lives. These risks include HIV-acquisition, but also the harms of economic precarity. Within a context in which using HIV prevention methods, such as condoms or abstinence, were for various reasons severely compromised by their contextual realities, some young people reported relying on irregular HIV testing as their singular method. The young people’s accounts demonstrate that an unintended consequence of the ‘push’ for HIV testing may be the justification of its replacement of other behavioural prevention strategies. This case study illustrates what impact such biomedical interventions may have if implemented as a priority and in isolation from the structural drivers of vulnerability: the social context of young people’s lives.