Military personnel are a unique population with heightened vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections (STIs), often exhibiting higher prevalence rates than civilians due to demographic, environmental and occupational factors. These vulnerabilities underscore the need for global prevalence estimates to guide effective, evidence-based interventions. This study aims to quantify the global burden of STIs among military personnel, providing a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment.

This systematic review will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Guidelines (2020). Using the CoCoPop (Condition, Context, and Population) framework, a comprehensive search strategy will be conducted in MEDLINE, Embase, Global Health and Scopus to retrieve peer-reviewed records published between January 2010 and June 2025. Eligible studies will report numerical STI prevalence data among military personnel. Studies with insufficient information to calculate prevalence or those relying on self-reported STI data will be excluded. Data extraction will include study details, military descriptors, STI prevalence and diagnostic methods. Risk of bias will be assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute critical assessment tool for prevalence and incidence studies. Prevalence estimates with 95% CIs will be reported for each STI and, where appropriate, pooled for curable STIs. Subgroup analyses will stratify prevalence by geographic region, service status, deployment status and socioeconomic factors. Heterogeneity will be evaluated within predefined subgroups using the I² statistic. Data will be presented in comprehensive tables and visualised with graphical tools, including forest plots for subgroup analyses and pooled estimates.

Ethical approval is not required for this review. The results will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed publication and conference presentations.

CRD42023472113.

Community participatory modelling merges participatory research approaches with mathematical modelling. Participatory approaches are grounded in the engagement of people with lived experience (eg, who are affected by the health condition under study) throughout the research process. Mathematical modelling of infectious disease (ID) dynamic transmissions is increasingly used as a tool for public health decision-making, generating predictions, inferring mechanisms and estimating the impact of potential interventions—all of which guide policies, strategies and resource allocation as part of the preparation and response to ID epidemics. However, little is known about the engagement of people with lived experience and affected communities in the ID modelling process. We will map the literature to explore participatory approaches undertaken in ID modelling (practical aspects of formalising participatory modelling), levels of participation and the potential influence from the perspective of communities engaged.

The scoping review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute Manual for Evidence Synthesis. The search strategy includes three electronic bibliographic databases (MEDLINE, Scopus and Embase), no language restrictions and sources published from 2000 to present. We will implement the search with and without the participatory keyword, as we recognise that some studies do not explicitly term community engagement as participatory modelling. After deduplication, two authors will independently screen the titles, abstracts and full texts, with discrepancies resolved with a third team member. We will extract the relevant information from the main text, parameter tables, supplemental files, bibliography, acknowledgment and author affiliation sections. The data extraction will follow a deductive content analysis where we draw from community-based participatory research approaches and established mathematical modelling steps. We will also extract data to assess whether there was equitable engagement of knowledge users by checking for indicators of three equitable engagement domains as outlined by the Ward framework (equity within partnership (eg, whether knowledge user influenced modelling decisions or remuneration), capacity to engage in future partnerships and shift in power/influence (eg, coauthorship). We will supplement our narrative analyses with summaries in tabular format and using appropriate data visualisations.

No ethics approval will be required for this scoping review because we will map evidence from publicly available literature sources. We will develop multilingual abstracts or one-page lay summaries of the findings (English, French and Swahili), a policy brief and will coauthor an open-access journal article. A summary of the findings will be shared via knowledge user-led presentations at the Maisha HIV and AIDS Conference and with other community-based organisations at the quarterly peer-to-peer support meetings.

The protocol has been registered in Open Science Framework, DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XQ2WP (December 2024).