Professor Neil Andersson, executive director of CIET Trust Botswana and ADAPT course coordinator, discusses the use of epidemiology and statistics in planning.

 In 2007, CIET launched the African Development of AIDS Prevention Trial (ADAPT) programme, aimed at strengthening the capacities of local health systems to design, conduct, and use the evidence from large-scale AIDS prevention trials in southern Africa.

This two-year initiative seeks to develop state-of-the-art, autonomous, and sustainable health measurement and planning resources for African countries to better implement and evaluate HIV/AIDS interventions –a much-needed development in all of Africa. It is a two-year CIET project funded by an HIV/AIDS Prevention Trials Capacity Building Grant from Canada's Global Health Research Initiative.  (See: www.ghri.ca).

During two four-week courses, 27 participants from government, universities and NGOs from 14 countries in the region received intensive, hands-on training on the fundamentals of epidemiology and statistics for health research and planning, with a focus on randomized control trials (RCTs). RCTs are currently considered the most reliable way to obtain scientific evidence on the effectiveness of health interventions. In population-based RCTs, populations are randomly assigned to intervention and control groups. People in intervention groups are exposed to a set of programs or actions to see how effective these are –e.g. door-to-door AIDS education campaigns. Those in the control groups get either no intervention or some standard ones –e.g. school-based AIDS education -- until the effectiveness of the intervention has been demonstrated.