Voice of Red Ribbon, an HIV prevention project for sex workers in Jiangchuan, China, has greatly increased its effectiveness by involving sex workers in the project's design and implementation. The project does regular community outreach work and runs a drop-in centre for sex workers, and was developed by Alliance China in collaboration with the local government partner, Jingchaun Centre for Disease Control.

Previous local government prevention projects had centred on just providing information, without communicating with sex workers, and had neglected a key target group as a result. Once sex workers were involved in consultations, the effectiveness and the knowledge base of the project were much improved. For example, after consulting with sex workers, government partners better understood issues surrounding condom use. Jingchaun Centre for Disease Control can now provide a higher standard of sexual health education to the sex workers - including information on how to use condoms and how to persuade clients to use them.

There are many obstacles to conducting successful HIV prevention projects with sex workers in China. For a start, sex work is illegal, and so sex workers tend to be unwilling to identify themselves by using drop-in centres. In order to bolster Voice of Red Ribbon's ability to involve the community in outreach work, the Alliance asked collaborating agent Population Services International to conduct training on drop-in centre management and peer education techniques. This training was designed to ensure greater dialogue and trust between government partners and sex workers, with the ultimate aim of increasing uptake of drop-in services.

The skills, experiences and personal stories of Voice of Red Ribbon will be included in a publication for local sex workers - and possibly also collaborating agencies and sex worker groups. The distribution of the publication will mark the end of the Alliance's involvement in the two year project.

Problems remain regarding the sustainability of projects such as this, however - even despite such initiatives as the upcoming publication, or recent lesson-sharing exchanges between the Jiangchuan group and the Alliance's sex worker group based in Sichuan. Without the funds to support it, the Jingchaun Centre for Disease Control faces the problem of how to keep the peer educator group functioning. If the group should break up, the sex worker community will lose important resources, information, and services, and the prevention message among the community is likely to weaken as a result.

It is possible that there will be future opportunities for the Alliance to invite Voice of Red Ribbon to participate in training designed to ensure that the experiences accumulated during the programme are spread throughout Jiangchuan province; and Jingchaun Centre for Disease Control is trying to secure central government funding for the continuity of the programme. It would be a significant loss if they were to be unsuccessful: in just two years, the programme has reached over 100 sex workers with prevention messages, and overseen the distribution of 4,000 condoms.