Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Since 2014, Ukraine has been in a protracted conflict, which escalated into a national full-scale war in 2022. Ukraine has the highest prevalence of HIV in Europe, and female sex workers have a reported prevalence of 3.1%, three times the national average. Typically, non-governmental organizations deliver sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, including sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections prevention and treatment, for adolescent girls and women who do sex work. Due to war related disruptions, there is an urgent need to map the impact on health care service delivery across the country. Successful SRH services are built on experiential knowledge of risk mitigation employed by adolescent girls and women who do sex work; their experiences are a central, yet under-studied, aspect of conflict and recovery. I will address these gaps using a phased mixed-methods approach grounded in feminist political economy. In collaboration with our research partner, I will conduct a desk review of health services, and analyze interviews with key informants who provide SRH services to understand how services have adapted. Using a sequential exploratory design I will also analyze secondary qualitative and quantitative data to examine how environments have shaped risks for adolescent girls and women who do sex work and how they respond to work related risk. The results from this study will be shared with community stakeholders, and policy and program leaders from the Center for Public Health of the Ministry of Health in Ukraine to provide evidence for designing effective SRH programs that respond to the changing landscape of wartime. Evidence-based programmatic planning will be necessary for the reconstruction of SRH services in a post-conflict state. This research presents an opportunity for Canadian and Ukrainian researchers to come together to lead cutting edge research on conflict and STBBI.