Yes She Can: Enabling Young Girls to Make Safer Sexual Choices Using an Innovative, Evidence-Based, Scalable Intervention

45% of forty-year-old men in Botswana have HIV, with similarly high rates across East and Southern Africa. Yet over 90% of young girls think these older men are safe. Revealing the risk of these older partners through a simple 1-hour class with dynamic, relatable peer educators is game-changing, empowering girls with life-saving information, after which girls choose to date age-mates instead, where risk of both HIV and pregnancy is dramatically lower. Supplemental COVID-19 funding is supporting launch of a “low-tech” remote solution (direct calls and SMS) to track and minimize unsafe sexual practices and sexual coercion among adolescents in vulnerable situations while in quarantine and out of school- an effective bridge to test how a remote monitoring method can be used when young girls are out of school.