The impact of an educational intervention on undergraduate students’ knowledge, acceptability, and willingness to pay for dapivirine vaginal ring in Nigeria's first indigenous university: a single-arm, non-randomized study.

Background: This study aimed to assess the impact of an educational intervention on knowledge, acceptability, and willingness to pay (WTP) for dapivirine vaginal ring (DPV-VR) by undergraduate female students at the University of Nigeria (UNN). Methods: A cross-sectional design was adopted to obtain responses from the respondents using a validated 23-item questionnaire. A sample size of 1500 was estimated from five systematically sampled faculties. Their acceptability was accessed before and after educating them on the dapivirine vaginal ring (DPV-VR). WTP was determined in Naira (N490/$1) using contingent valuation. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the findings, with inter-faculty comparison done with the Chi-squared test. Results: 1017 students responded to the questionnaire. The modal age was 18–24 years (754 [74.1%]), and most of them (886 [87.1%]) were unmarried. More than half of the respondents had tested for HIV (531 [52.2%])), with 3 (1.5%), 3 (1.7%), 2 (0.6%), 2 (1.8%) and 1 (0.5%) student from Arts, Biological Sciences, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Social Sciences, and Veterinary Medicine, respectively, having positive results. Only 304 (29.9%) of the students had prior knowledge of DPV-VR. There was about a two-fold increase in the acceptability of the dapivirine vaginal ring (DPV-VR) (294 to 596) after the intervention (p ≤ 0.001). Most of the students (466 [45.8%]) indicated that they would be willing to pay < N410.00 for a single dapivirine vaginal ring (DPV-VR). Conclusions: Many of the female students at UNN were willing to use the dapivirine vaginal ring (DPV-VR); even more after they were informed of its importance. Most of the students were willing to pay less than one dollar out-of-pocket for the ring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]