Avahan – The India AIDS Initiative: The Business of HIV Prevention at Scale

In 2003 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began its large HIV prevention program, the India AIDS Initiative, later called Avahan, to curtail the spread of HIV in India. At the time, there was an understandable sense of urgency about the rising prevalence of HIV in the world's second most populous country.

Avahan has successfully built a large-scale HIV intervention program in its first five years. It operates in six states in India, which have a combined population of 300 million people. Within these states, it provides prevention services to nearly 200,000 female sex workers, 60,000 high-risk men who have sex with men, and 20,000 injecting drug users, together with 5 million men at risk.