CIET is a group of non-profit foundations, charities, non-governmental organisations and institutes dedicated to building the community voice into planning. Professor Neil Andersson started CIET in Mexico in 1985 to promote wider participation in health planning – Centro de Investigación de Enfermedades Tropicales (Tropical Disease Research Centre). CIET methods evolved to deal with other issues and the acronym has come to represent the values of the organisation: community information, empowerment and transparency. In Canada, CIETcanada merged with Participatory Research at McGill (PRAM) and has an institutional base in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University.

CIET and the Government of Botswana are partners in the Inter-ministerial National Structural Interventions Trial (INSTRUCT). This nationwide cluster randomized controlled trial in a stepped-wedge design (trial registered as ISRCTN54878784) scales up and rolls out a combined package of structural and behavioural interventions to reduce choice disability and gender violence and hence reduce the risk of HIV infection, particularly among young women.

The INSTRUCT interventions include: supporting young women to access government structural support programmes; working with the government programmes to refocus them towards young women; and using an audio-drama to create an enabling environment in communities for young women to begin to make protective choices.

The trial is led bythe National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA) and CIET, supported by other ministries.