“They arrested me for loving a schoolgirl”: Ethnography, HIV, and a feminist assessment of the age of consent law as a gender-based structural intervention in Uganda

► Conventional public health evaluations are not equipped to examine how macro-level interventions are shaped by local power dynamics. ► Longitudinal ethnographic research and case studies reveal unintended consequences of macro-level interventions. ► Analysis of the age of consent law highlights how planners and communities hold conflicting views about gendered HIV risk. ► The article demonstrates how ethnography can help design and evaluate theoretically-grounded macro-level interventions.