ABSTRACT
I had the opportunity to design and supervise a study of STDs and AIDS in Liberia in 1988 when I was working on an AID "centrally funded" or global family-planning social-marketing project known as SOMARC (Social Marketing for Change). The SOMARC project had been successful in using existing private-sector channels to promote contraceptives in developing countries, and with the exponential growth in HIV seropositivity in Africa we were interested in learning how to promote condoms to limit this growth. At the time, I had recently completed an evaluation of an effective and innovative AIDS prevention/condom promotion campaign in the Dominican Republic (Green and Conde 1988), where I had been managing a social-marketing program for family planning. The evaluation had stimulated my interest in finding new ways to intervene in the spread of AIDS.
