Population Services International PSI

  Population Services International (PSI)deploys commercial marketing strategies to promote health products, services, and other types of healthy behavior that enable low-income and other vulnerable people to lead healthier lives. PSI is the leading social marketing organization in the world. PSI is a non-profit NGO based in Washington, D.C. with a focus on HIV/AIDS prevention, family planning, and social marketing of maternal and child health products and services. PSI has health promotion projects in over 60 countries around the globe. PSI in Central Asia PSI has been working since 2002 in four countries of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. PSI has been implementing HIV prevention and drug demand reduction programs regionally for over three years, targeting vulnerable groups including IDUs, CSWs, clients of CSWs, high risk youth, and “pre-injectors”, youth most likely to initiate injecting drugs. PSI is currently implementing two large regional projects: the USAID-funded Drug Demand Reduction Program (DDRP) and the Capacity HIV Prevention Program in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. Over the last four years, a regional team of 238 PSI youth peer educators has provided high quality behavior change communications for HIV and drug prevention for more than 217,000 high risk youth in nine high priority sites spread over four countries. Since its inception in 2002, PSI has also social marketed over 10 million condoms in four countries of Central Asia, focusing on high risk groups. PSI has also provided interpersonal communications for HIV and drug prevention with tens of thousands of IDUs, SWs, and clients of SWs throughout Central Asia with a team of more than 100 outreach workers.