Project Pays HIV-Positive Kenyan Women to Get IUD

The Nation examines how Project Prevention, a California-based organization that "made headlines for offering to pay [U.S.] women addicted to drugs $300 if they agreed to be sterilized, or ongoing payments as long as addicted women used long-term contraception," has now started a program in Kenya at the prompting of "an enterprising university student in western Kenya" named Willice Onyango. The article looks at how Onyango approached Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris to support a program in Kenya to prevent mother-to-child-transmission of HIV. The organization now "partners with a Kenyan doctor who inserts IUDs into HIV-positive women; the doctor, who receives $7 per insertion, screens women for their suitability for the device. ... The first ten women paid for contraceptive use got IUDs last month. Onyango reported that the $40 each woman receives is pooled together and given to the group leader to support the women's business -- in the first group's case, a tree nursery." The article includes quotes from those in support of and against the program (Clark, 5/6).

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