‘Let Us Protect Our Future ’ a culturally congruent evidenced-based HIV/STD risk-reduction intervention for young South African adolescents

One of the worst HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world is occurring in South Africa, where hetero-sexual exposure is the main mode of HIV trans-mission. Young people 15–24 years of age, particularly women, account for a large share of new infections. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for behavior-change interventions to reduce the incidence of HIV among adoles-cents in South Africa. However, there are few such interventions with proven efficacy for South African adolescents, especially young ado-lescents. A recent cluster-randomized controlled trial of the ‘Let Us Protect Our Future! ’ HIV/ STD risk-reduction intervention for Grade 6 South African adolescents (mean age 12.4 years) found significant decreases in self-re-ported sexual risk behaviors compared with a control intervention. This article describes the intervention, the use of the social cognitive theory and the reasoned action approach to de-velop the intervention, how formative research informed its development and the acceptability of the intervention. Challenges in designing and implementing HIV/STD risk-reduction interven-tions for young adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa are discussed