Asia and Eastern Europe programmes celebrate ‘blue sky week’
24 September 2007
This August saw the International HIV/AIDS Alliance’s annual Asia and Eastern Europe ‘blue sky week’ being hosted by Alliance linking organisation KHANA in Cambodia. The five-day meeting – a strategic and creative thinking week – allowed participants from the region to share ideas and news and feed back on the Alliance's strategy and future.
The aim of this year’s blue sky week, apart from continuing to strengthen the partnership, was to seek input for the Alliance’s global strategic framework for 2008-2010. Delegates discussed global and regional strategic planning, cross-cutting issues, policy and advocacy, sharing best practice, and strengthening partnerships between members. They also focused on challenges and concerns common to the Alliance's country members, with the aim of developing collective long-term strategies to respond to HIV.
Forty-one delegates were present from Alliance country offices and linking organisations from Bangladesh, China, India, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Ukraine, as well as the UK Alliance secretariat. Each country's representatives shared their own experiences and participated in brainstorming to find ways to solve common problems and reach common goals.
Dr. Oum Sopheap, KHANA's Executive Director, felt the meeting came at a good time for Cambodia to share experiences and activities: "Cambodia has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the region,” he said, “but we are now happy that the figures are down from 1.2 percent in 2003 to 0.9 percent in 2006. We will continue our effort further to bring the number down, but… we have to expand and sustain our interventions in the field."
Though these prevalence figures are encouraging, Dr Sopheap also pointed out that Cambodia has many more HIV-related challenges to deal with – including confronting the changing face of the epidemic, providing care and support to an increasing number of infected and affected adults and children, and reaching out to drug users, homosexual men, and sex workers and their clients.
Delegates to the blue sky week had an opportunity to visit the work of KHANA's NGO partners in the field: ten groups of delegates visited different NGO partners working in home-based care, prevention, integrated care and prevention, and drug-related HIV prevention and education. Taking home ideas about how to respond to a changing epidemic, they were able to reflect on a country which – to date – represents one of the few millennium development goal success stories.
