Setting a Regional Agenda The Population Council’s regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean, with support from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, hosted a three-day meeting in Mexico City in February 2006, which brought together leaders from academe, civil society, national governments, and donor organizations to set priorities for research and action on migration, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV and AIDS, and related themes. More than 50 experts from El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States participated. The meeting focused on the need to employ such methodologies as operations research to identify service-delivery problems and test programmatic solutions for responding to the AIDS epidemic and migration issues. Operations research has been instrumental in designing prevention and care interventions and building support for policy change. Programs highlighted during the conference included the Council’s “Health on the Road,” a holistic program to provide STI/HIV and other health services and education to truck drivers crossing the Brazil-Paraguay border; and the Mesoamerican HIV/AIDS and Mobile Populations project, coordinated by Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, which has implemented HIV-prevention interventions at 11 border crossings in Mexico and Central America. Meeting participants focused on the challenges in translating existing research results into practice and the reality that few of the existing programs for mobile and migrant populations have been evaluated to gauge their effectiveness and impact. They also emphasized the need to ensure government accountability by increasing capacity for monitoring national and international agreements related to human rights as efforts are made to address such concerns as HIV and AIDS and migration. (Return to issue contents)
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