Social science expertise might not cure the 3.35 million Nigerians — 4.4 percent of the country’s population — infected with HIV/AIDS. But according to Richard Joseph, the director of Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies (PAS), knowledge can help design prevention efforts that succeed where others have fallen short.

To meet this need for quality research, the PAS initiated the Research Alliance to Combat HIV/AIDS (REACH) four years ago, a collaborative program with the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Despite ongoing prevention initiatives, Nigeria has the third-highest number of HIV cases in the world after South Africa and India. That fact prompted the formation of REACH, Joseph said at a PAS colloquium on April 20, titled “How Can Nigeria Reduce HIV Transmission?”

Last December the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave PAS a $3 million grant.

“This three-year grant is the result of several years of conversations with the Gates Foundation,” said Joseph, the principal investigator for REACH. “Gates made a very decisive move to focus on prevention, because a lot of attention was devoted to treatment while people were still getting infected.”

REACH, will mostly be conducted in Nigeria by Nigerian researchers. It aims to produce knowledge and recommendations to initiate better HIV/AIDS-prevention strategies and help policymakers stop the spread of the epidemic.

“With all the programs that have gone into Nigeria, there’s only seven percent of people actually tested for HIV/AIDS,” said Nkem Dike, the project’s coordinator. “REACH is not just another HIV/AIDS research program. We will use community-based and social science methods to go to communities and find out why people are not getting tested.”

Joseph also described the Research Alliance as an asset for the university.

“REACH is a project Northwestern should feel good about because there is this terrible crisis in Africa and this is a contribution that we can make as a research community,” Joseph said. “The program will also provide a lot of opportunities for training of researchers, especially Nigerian, and when it is established and ongoing, provide opportunities for Northwestern faculty, graduate and undergraduate students to get involved in various ways.”

So far, the group has concentrated its efforts on background research in Nigeria.

“The researchers have traveled to various parts of the country to find out which NGOs (non-governmental organizations) were doing HIV/AIDS work there and what kind of gaps REACH could fill,” Dike said. “We hope that by June, we will be able to go to the field, produce results within a couple of months and have them published soon after.”

According to Dike, understanding the dynamics of HIV in Nigeria requires more than biomedical research.

“With scientific studies you can find out statistics, percentages of people who think that using condoms is important, but not why [that] despite this knowledge, they are not using them,” Dike said. “Nigeria is a very diverse place and what works for one community may not work for another. Using social science methods can really help us understand this.”

The alliance has identified two approaches for the conduct of community-level studies. One, a “longitudinal” approach, will take place during two years in two large communities. Another will be a cross-sectional survey of clinical prevention services across the country, initially beginning with three sites.

Joseph said that the first time envisioned this project, he could hardly imagine how challenging it would be.

“Of course, nobody willingly takes on Nigeria if you don’t know what you’re doing and what you’re getting into,” Joseph said. “Nigeria is a really big and populous country that has suffered a lot in terms of institutional development, and nobody had ever done this kind of project before.”

According to Joseph, the grant could be the first stage of a longer and wider project.

“By the time the program is fully operating, there might be at least 30 people involved at different levels,” Joseph said. “We are hoping that if we are reasonably successful, the Gates Foundation will not only want to renew its support but also increase it.”