Our foundation got very involved in
efforts to avoid HIV
spreading to the general population
and India was a place that was a huge risk
and the dynamic is that it gets into the sex workers
and you get high prevalence in the sex workers, and then it spreads.
And so if you can stop it, keep it
below 20% in the sex workers,
as opposed to getting up to 80%,
then you never get a widespread epidemic.
And so the question of "How could
you counsel these women
who are often powerless, often coerced, mistreated by the police —
How could you get them to insist on safe practice?"
Most case, a condom usage.
That was the challenge we faced.
And the answer that our team came
up with was to build communities
around these sex workers.
Build a place they could go and talk to each other about lots of problems.
About the police, about what
to do about their kids.
And so by uplifting that whole community
and letting them talk and trust each other ...
one of the outcomes was that they decided to really demand condom use
in a way that avoided this widespread
HIV infection in that group,
which meant that it never got even to a tenth of
the level it was predicted to in India as a whole.
It's still there, but at pretty low levels.
And so that community had a lot of benefits way beyond just reducing HIV prevalence.
