The Special Initiative
This is a five year project that involves three countries, namely Malawi, Swaziland and Kenya.

Goals and Objectives
Goal: To strengthen the evidence of the benefits and costs of a range of models for delivering integrated HIV and SRH services in high and medium HIV prevalence settings for reducing HIV (and associated stigma) and unintended pregnancies.

Main objectives:
Determine the benefits of different integrated models to increase range, uptake and quality of selected SRH and HIV services
Determine the impact of different integrated services on changes in HIV risk-behavior; HIV related stigma and unintended pregnancies (in year 1 we will also investigate feasibility of measuring impact on STI/HIV incidence).Establish the efficiency of using different operational models for delivering integrated services in terms of: cost, utilization of existing infrastructure and human resources.Increase utilization of research findings by policy and program decision makers through involvement of and dissemination to key stakeholders.

Key Research questions
This project will answer three key sets of research questions:

1) What are the relative benefits of different models of integrated SRH and HIV services over separately provided services? Does integration lead to:

increases in the numbers of clients using services;

changes in the profile of clients attending services;

increases in the range of services accessed by clients;

improvements in the quality of services?