Population Council is an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental
organisation that seeks to improve the well-being and reproductive health of the
current and future generations around the world and to help achieve a humane,
equitable, and sustainable balance between people and resources. The Council
conducts research in three areas:
HIV and
AIDS; poverty, gender,
and youth; and reproductive health. Established in 1952, the Council is governed
by an international board of trustees. Its New York headquarters supports a
global network of regional and country offices.
The
Population Council's work ranges over the broad field of population:
from research to improve services and products that respond to people's
reproductive health needs to designing interventions to treat and prevent
HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; from studies of the effects of
population factors on a country's ability to provide a better life for its
citizens to research that investigates the influence of education and livelihood
opportunities on young girls and women. The Council is also concerned with the
reproductive health and well-being of the one billion adolescents in the
developing world, who are about to enter their reproductive years and whose
behaviour will shape the future of their countries. These are some of the global
issues that engage the Council and its scientists.
The
Knowledge
Network Project undertaken by the Population Council aims to provide
evidence-based programmatic learnings from up-scaled HIV prevention
interventions to guide HIV prevention programmes for vulnerable populations most
at risk in India and other developing countries, with similar concentrated
epidemics.

In 2003, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation established Avahan, a national HIV
prevention initiative in India, to expand access to effective prevention
programmes in six states with high infection rates and along the nation’s major
trucking routes. Avahan is currently working with 280,000 individuals such as
female sex workers, men who have sex with men, and injecting drug users and
about five million clients of sex workers and truckers who are at risk of
contracting HIV. The scale of this operation and the diversity of the
intervention environment make Avahan a `live laboratory’ of learnings for HIV
prevention. Since its start, a total of 24 distinguished organisations/universities
have been involved in programme implementation, monitoring, evaluation, advocacy
and knowledge building. During this period, extensive data have been collected
by Avahan’s implementing partners, as well as its evaluation and
knowledge-building partners. The objective has been to continuously refine the
programme and to inform and guide India’s national programme on best practices.
While Avahan’s implementing partners have generated information on programme
access, quality, coverage and utilisation of services, its knowledge-building
and evaluation partners have conducted a number of cross-sectional and
longitudinal behavioural and biological surveys such as the Integrated
Behavioural and Biological Assessments, surveys of the general population,
surveys of migrant and mobile population groups, analysis of data on HIV from
the National Family Health Surveys, research on community mobilisation and other
studies.
The Knowledge Network Project, through the process of
documentation and dissemination of significant programmatic learnings from
Avahan’s up-scaled HIV prevention interventions with female sex workers,
self-identified men who have sex with men and clients of sex workers including
trucker populations, aims to strengthen national capacity in HIV prevention
interventions.
The IndiaHIV portal has been developed by the Population
Council as part of the Knowledge Network Project initiative, with the support of
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This knowledge sharing portal is a
repository of information, wherein lessons learned from HIV prevention
programmes implemented by Avahan - the India AIDS Initiative - in selected
states with high HIV prevalence among most at-risk population groups will be
made available nationally and globally.