Healthlink Worldwide

Overview

The HIV epidemic is continuing to have a devastating impact on communities across sub-Saharan Africa. Traditional coping mechanisms and community structures can become weakened, making it increasingly important to find sustainable and innovative responses to the epidemic.

Community-based organisations and non-government organisations have a crucial role to play in this. They are often catalysts to support action at community level and it is here that the most effective and enduring programmes take place. Yet, these organisations also need to deal with the pressures that the HIV epidemic places on them, including balancing their own organisational development with an ever-increasing demand for services from communities. Above all, community-based organisations need to be able to cope with change, such as staff leaving or dying, changes in the funding environment, political change, and changes in the development of the HIV epidemic in Africa.

Building the strength of community-based organisations
Healthlink Worldwide is working on a five year project, with funding from a Comic Relief strategic grant. The Positive Action project will help develop the capacity of the following five organisations in sub-Saharan Africa:

• National Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS (Uganda)
• Youth Net and Counselling (Malawi)
• Family AIDS Caring Trust (Zimbabwe)
• Tilla Association of women living with HIV (Ethiopia)
• Kibera Community Self-Help Programme (Kenya).

Healthlink Worldwide has strong links with all five organisations, having worked with them over a number of years. All have a similar community-based ethos, a community-based approach to HIV and AIDS work and focus on HIV communication. The opportunity to work together has been welcomed by the partners as a way to maximise learning and staff development, share knowledge and reach out to a wider audience.

Responding to HIV at community level
The Positive Action project allows the partners to take a holistic approach to supporting HIV responses, and enables them to more effectively deliver key areas of their work with young people, children, women and men living with HIV. At all stages of the project, partners will seek to promote community discussion, debate and action, leading to responses that are appropriate, negotiated and sustainable.

The project also provides core funding for these organisations, which supports them to develop initiatives such as home-based care and counselling services, support groups, prevention work with young people (in and out of school), and orphan and vulnerable children programmes. There is also a planned programme of capacity development to enhance the way they work, and strengthen their capacity to be innovative, and responsive. Capacity development includes activities such as the introduction and implementation of policies such as child protection, volunteer policies and increased staff understanding of gender needs and participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation.

The Positive Action project has four main aims:

1. Strengthen capacity and leadership of five organisations in East and Southern Africa to work effectively with their beneficiary communities.
2. Develop and enhance community-led structures and programmes for service delivery, and improve community leadership and capacity to meet the needs of people living with HIV, carers and children.
3. Create an enabling environment where rights, entitlements and needs of communities and vulnerable groups affected by HIV are recognised and respected.
4. Consolidate learning at community and organisational level on what works within HIV prevention, care and support and treatment.

Our involvement
As a specialist health and development agency Healthlink Worldwide provides expertise in communication, knowledge management and learning. As part of the Positive Action project we are supporting the five partners to develop their monitoring and evaluation capacity, including support on the documentation of learning. All five partners have identified this as a priority. We are also working with them to provide technical support in areas such as strengthening information and knowledge systems (including resource centre development), advocacy and rights-based approaches, project planning and management, and participatory communication methods.

Measuring the impact of the work our partners do is important, both in terms of organisational learning as well as to ensure financial accountability and transparency. Healthlink Worldwide will also facilitate the sharing of learning between the partners and their wider networks to maximise the impact of the project.