Acceptability and uptake of oral HIV self-testing among rural community members in Tanzania: a pilot study

New strategies are needed to improve HIV testing rates in Tanzania, particularly among adult men. We sought to investigate if HIV oral self-testing would increase HIV testing uptake in Tanzanian rural community homes. The study design was a prospective community-randomized pilot study, in two matched villages with similar characteristics (intervention and control villages) Before data collection, we trained village health workers and research assistants for one week. We recruited male and female adults from 50 representative households in each of two villages in eastern Tanzania. We collected data at baseline and we followed-up the enrolled households after a one-month period. There was a high interest in testing for HIV, with all participants from both arms (100%; n = 259) reporting that they would like to test for HIV. After the one-month follow-up, overall, 66.1% (162/245) of study participants reported to have tested for HIV in both arms. In the intervention arm, 97.6% (124/127) reported that they tested for HIV versus in the control arm, 32.2% (38/118) tested for HIV, p-value < 0.001. In Tanzania, we found that availability of HIV self-testing was associated with an enormous increase in HIV testing uptake in a rural population.