In this week's PLoS Medicine , Joseph Tucker from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA and colleagues lay out a social entrepreneurship for sexual health (SESH) approach that focuses on decentralized community delivery, multisectoral networks, and horizontal collaboration (business, technology, and academia).
They argue that while SESH approaches have yet to be widely implemented, they show great promise: "Social marketing and sales of point-of-care, community-based tests for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, conditional cash transfers to incentivize safe sex, and microenterprise among most-at-risk-populations are all SESH tools that can optimize the delivery of comprehensive sexual health interventions," say the authors.
Funding: Financial support for this research came from an NIH Fogarty K01 Award (US NIH 1K01TW008200-01A1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Citation: Tucker JD, Fenton KA, Peckham R, Peeling RW (2012) Social Entrepreneurship for Sexual Health (SESH): A New Approach for Enabling Delivery of Sexual Health Services among Most-at-Risk Populations. PLoS Med 9(7): e1001266. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001266
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