Alliance Zambia
5/9 provinces
Alliance Zambia supports community action on HIV, with a particular focus on working with youth, orphans and vulnerable children, and people living with HIV.
HIV prevalence in Zambia is 14.3% among adults. This translates to one million people living with HIV. Of the 330,000 in need of antiretroviral treatment, only 46% were receiving it at the end of 2007. Treatment access is much lower among children.
HIV in Zambia is mainly transmitted through unprotected sex. The epidemic is fuelled by multiple concurrent partnerships and transactional, commercial and intergenerational sex.
Due to poor coverage of programmes to prevent mother-to-child transmission, approximately 95,000 children are living with HIV in Zambia. The country is also home to an estimated 600,000 AIDS orphans.
WHAT WE DO
ACER
Alliance Zambia’s activities include the Antiretroviral Community Education and Referral (ACER) Programme, which links community organisations and support networks – traditional healers, home carers, HIV positive people’s groups and church groups – with government health services.
Working in five of Zambia’s nine provinces, the ACER programme employs people openly living with HIV to promote uptake of treatment, to support treatment adherence and to promote prevention efforts in community and clinic settings.
ACER has been supported through the Alliance’s Africa Regional Programme, Dutch AIDS Fonds, Global Fund support and Alliance unrestricted funds.
Combating stigma
As part of the Alliance’s Africa Regional Programme, Alliance Zambia works to combat HIV-related stigma and discrimination, which hinder access to services and fuel HIV transmission. Since it was established in 2004, the Regional Stigma and Discrimination Programme has trained anti-stigma trainers in 22 African countries.
Orphans and vulnerable children
With funding from Irish Aid, Alliance Zambia is working with the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services (MCDSS) to strengthen government and community support systems for orphans and vulnerable children.
Alliance Zambia is building the capacity of government structures to take a pivotal role in coordination at community and district level. This approach aims to ensure that civil society organisations avoid duplicating work and are able to distribute limited resources fairly, including to more remote, rural communities.
Health Communication Partnership
Alliance Zambia is part of a consortium that implements the USAID-funded Health Communication Partnership (HCP) in Zambia. HCP supports activities at various levels of the health care system working in close collaboration with government bodies, local and international organisations and community-based groups.
The programme works across all nine provinces, focusing on reducing high-risk sexual behaviour and strengthening individual and collective action for health. Within the consortium, Alliance Zambia focuses on community mobilisation, leadership training and gender and health issues.
Empowering communities
With support from the Global Fund, Alliance Zambia provides grants and technical support to strengthen the leadership and capacity of community based organisations. This includes giving training through regular visits, mentoring and skills building workshops.
Alliance Zambia uses its own toolkits to share knowledge at community level, and facilitates the exchange of knowledge between communities and organisations.
Improving policies
Policy work includes a project supported by Oxfam-NOVIB through the Centre For Economic Governance And Aids In Africa (CEGAA) aimed at improving participatory budgeting and budget monitoring for health.
The National Partnership Platform (NPP) is a policy initiative that has been integrated into Alliance Zambia. The NPP aims to spearhead information exchange, dialogue and advocacy on HIV and tuberculosis at the country level, and to stimulate greater civil society unity and focus.
Happy, Healthy and Safe
‘Together We can Grow up Happy, Healthy and Safe’ is a regional programme covering Zambia and Swaziland, which began in March 2009. This innovative programme aims to improve the sexual, reproductive and psychosocial health of young people 10-20 years of age. It is funded by Swiss Development and Cooperation.
FUTURE PLANS
Alliance Zambia plans to expand its work to have a greater impact at the national level, reaching communities in less well served, rural communities. Also, recognizing that HIV and TB are inextricably linked and require combined responses, Alliance Zambia is planning to integrate responses to TB in its programme work.