Alliance Uganda
40/80 districts
The International HIV/AIDS Alliance has worked in Uganda since 2005 to increase access to HIV prevention, care, treatment and support services including support for orphans and vulnerable children.
Although still severely affected by HIV, with 5.4% of all adults infected, Uganda has achieved considerable success in its response to the epidemic. Prevalence was much higher in the early 1990s at 18% in rural areas and 25-30% in urban areas. Political leadership, commitment and openness, combined with community action, reduced the rate of new infections.
Important challenges remain in the national response. Services are not well coordinated and often fail to reach rural communities. Many local organisations are under-funded and lack the capacity to make a significant impact. Many people living with HIV are not accessing services due to lack of awareness, transport difficulties or inability to pay fees.
Community capacity to care for orphans is increasingly overstretched as the number of needy children keeps rising. Uganda was home to an estimated one million AIDS orphans at the end of 2007.
WHAT WE DO
Our programmes
The International HIV/AIDS Alliance has worked in Uganda since 2005 to increase access to HIV prevention, care, treatment and support services including support for orphans and vulnerable children. A country office, known as Alliance Uganda, was established in 2006. Alliance Uganda aims to contribute significantly to achieving universal access to HIV services in Uganda through two key projects:
- The CORE Initiative (Communities Responding to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic)
- The Networks Project (Expanding the Role of Networks of People Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda).
The CORE Initiative
The CORE Initiative is a five-year project funded by USAID and implemented by a consortium led by CARE International. The initiative supports the efforts of the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD) to coordinate Uganda’s national response to orphans and other vulnerable children (OVC) and HIV prevention among youth. The CORE Initiative has two objectives:
- To strengthen the ministry’s capacity to provide strategic direction, coordination and monitoring of the overall response to OVC, including strengthening links to districts and civil society organisations
- To provide capacity building and technical support to local governments and civil society organisations, to enable them to improve and expand programmes.
Alliance Uganda helped to establish the National Implementation Unit for OVC programmes within the MGLSD. The office has also developed key technical resource materials to inform and guide the ministry to lead the national response to OVC. Alliance Uganda has trained technical support organisations and developed dissemination plans to ensure the guides and tools reach all 83 districts of Uganda
By the end of 2007, supported civil society organisations had reached 88,760 OVC, 17,969 OVC service providers, 259,084 young people and 9,514 trainers. The technical support organisations received grants worth $2.8 million in 2008.
The project’s technical support model has increased provision of technical support by civil society, thus pioneering a major government-civil society partnership. To ensure sustainability of this approach, the CORE Initiative has transferred its granting mechanism to the Civil Society Fund, which was developed to ensure that civil society HIV, tuberculosis and malaria services are harmonized with the government’s national plans.
In 2008 Alliance Uganda was selected as Technical Management Agent for the Civil Society Fund for HIV and AIDS projects. More than four hundred organisations have received feedback on their grant proposals, and Alliance Uganda has led workshops for fifty-four who won funding.
The Networks Project
Since July 2006 Alliance Uganda has implemented the USAID-funded project “Expanding the Role of Networks of People Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda”. This project enhances the involvement of people living with HIV in service delivery and policy formulation. It does so by increasing access to HIV services, building the capacity of groups of people living with HIV, and supporting innovative approaches by these groups at district and community levels.
The project is implemented in half of Uganda’s eighty districts, where the Alliance works directly with groups of people living with HIV and over 1,300 Network Support Agents, all of whom are HIV positive. These women and men have put aside their HIV status and dedicated their lives to the service of others, working alongside health care workers at 643 sites, ranging from sub-county level health facilities to district and regional referral hospitals.
The quality of care provided to those living with or affected by HIV has been transformed as people living with HIV take the lead in facilitating access to services for vulnerable individuals. With this approach the programme has directly contributed to the Universal Access targets of the Uganda National Strategic Plan for responding to HIV and AIDS.
Over the past year the project has reached nearly two million people, enabling them to access and utilize existing services provided by government departments, civil society organisations, health workers, international development agencies and communities themselves. More than 400,000 people received psychosocial support, representing 38.5% of the Universal Access target.
Regional Technical Support Hub
In 2008 the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, with financial support from UNAIDS, established a Regional Technical Support Hub for Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. This hub, hosted by Alliance Uganda, provides technical support to civil society organisations and others responding to HIV. The Alliance has trained key technical support providers in areas such as monitoring and evaluation, finance and accessing money from the Global Fund.