THE ASSOCIATED PRESS –President Bush’s $15 billion effort to fight AIDS has handed out nearly a quarter of its grants to religious groups, and officials are aggressively pursuing new church partners that often emphasize disease prevention through abstinence and fidelity over condom use.

The outreach to nontraditional AIDS players highlights the debate over how best to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The debate has created a vast competition for money.

Conservative Christian allies of the president are pressing the U.S. foreign aid agency to give fewer dollars to groups that distribute condoms or work with prostitutes. The Bush administration provided more than 560 million condoms abroad last year, compared with some 350 million in 2001.

Secular organizations in Africa are concerned that new money to groups without AIDS experience may dilute the impact of Bush’s historic three-year-old program.

“We clearly recognize that it is very important to work with faith-based organizations,” said Dan Mullins, deputy regional director for southern and western Africa for CARE, one of the best-known humanitarian organizations.

“But at the same time we don’t want to fall into the trap of assuming faith-based groups are good at everything,” Mullins said.

The administration is beginning a broad effort to attract newcomers and distribute money for AIDS prevention and care beyond the large non-profit groups that traditionally have led the fight.

The New Partners Initiative reserves $200 million through the 2008 budget year for community and church groups with little or no background in government grants. Some may have health operations in Africa but no experience in HIV work. Others may be homegrown groups in Africa that have not previously sought U.S. support.

“The notion that because people have always received aid money that they’ll get money needs to end,” Deputy U.S. global AIDS coordinator Mark Dybul said in an interview with The Associated Press. “The only way to have sustainable programs is to have programs that are wholly owned in terms of management personnel at the local level.”

For prevention, Bush embraces the “ABC” strategy: abstinence before marriage, being faithful to one partner, and condoms targeted for high-risk activity. The Republican-led Congress mandated that a third of AIDS money be reserved for abstinence and fidelity.

U.S.-backed programs have spread abstinence and faithfulness education to more than 13 million people in Uganda, according to the State Department. Officials promote the nation as an “ABC” model, with its HIV-infection rate down by more than half in a decade.