A commentary on the triadic theory of influence as a guide for adapting HIV prevention programs for new contexts and populations: The CHAMP-South Africa story

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the Collaborative HIV Prevention and Adolescent Mental Health Project-South Africa (CHAMPSA) began and to present some of the results from this South African version of CHAMP. This paper informs readers of a number of lessons about international program translation. The first important lesson is that there are universal principles of health behavior change that seem to be useful across cultures. The implementation of these principles, however, needs to be informed by an in-depth understanding of local cultural contexts. The second important lesson is that it is possible to undertake large-scale, scientifically sophisticated community-based prevention research in developing countries through international collaborative research projects. It is the authors' hope that this mixture of science, service, and business will inspire other public health, community mental health, research, and business professionals to develop international prevention interventions that can be shown to be effective, and disseminated on a wide scale.