Resources search

Many community service organisations (CSOs) in Malawi turn a blind eye to the impact of HIV and AIDS in their own organisation. This is partly because, although individual staff are highly aware of HIV and AIDS issues, the internal impact on their own organisation is not very visible yet, and costs are unknown. Most CSOs do not yet fully appreciate the extent of what mainstreaming HIV and AIDS in their organisation means. This brief paper contends that if the programming side of an organisation is going to be effective, it is critical for an organisation to put its own house in order and mainstream HIV and AIDS internally. It presents its case study and describes challenges encountered by 23 participating organisations. Lessons for donors, and for CSOs are elaborated

This publication is aimed at governments, development partners, and public and private health facilities seeking to provide ART as part of comprehensive care and support for people living with HIV and AIDS. It describes valuable lessons learned from several ART learning sites throughout Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. By the end of April 2005, more than 5,800 new patients had initiated ART through this treatment and care initiative. Strategies, challenges and key recommendations are presented and comments by national and community leaders, providers and patients appear throughout the text to give readers a sense of the programs as they progressed. The lessons may not have direct relevance to all health facilities providing or planning to provide ART; it should be used or adapted depending on the epidemiological, political, social, cultural and economic context of each setting

This publication presents the activities and lessons learned from a project which sought to halve malnutrition among preschool children, raise primary school enrollment, reduce dropout and repetition rates, improve psycho-social and cognitive development, and increase the number of mothers practicing appropriate childcare. A strategic communication programme was designed to help mothers and other caregivers adopt new behaviours needed to achieve project outcomes. It helped the project team identify necessary changes in behaviour, knowledge or attitude for all target audiences; frame project-related issues relevant to different stakeholders, such as parliamentarians, mothers, community leaders, educators, and local government administrators; craft persuasive messages according to their needs, concerns and perceptions; and use the most appropriate communication channels. The communication strategy included a: national advocacy effort aimed at parliamentarians, health and education ministry officials, district and community leaders; multi-media campaign that emphasized three behaviour change interventions; training programme for health workers and pre-school teachers on their role; and monitoring and evaluation component to ensure that materials were disseminated via cost-effective channels of communication and that messages reached target audiences. Lessons learned emphasize the value of developing a comprehensive communication strategy during project design.

Disabled people have been neglected in programmes for poverty allevation. Uganda was one of the first countries to develop a poverty reducation strategy paper (PRSP) and also started to include disabled people into the follow up phases. This report shows the challenges that the disability movements in Uganda and other African countries are facing in the processes of poverty allevation programmes. It seeks to document the experience in Uganda to draw out lessons for other countries going through PRSP processes.

This publication summarises the findings and broader 'lessons learned' from the Disability KaR programme (2003-2005). The programme developed a strong focus on mainstreaming disability in development, saw partnerships grow between organisations in developed and developing countries, and saw disabled people taking a lead in research

“This study reviews the JRF’s Making Change Happen programme, which provided a year’s funding to four grassroots development organisations with a track record in providing support to black disabled people. The report sets out the learning that emerged from the four development projects. It includes: overviews of the four development projects; learning and common themes, with boxed illustrations from the projects; detailed case studies from two of the projects; practical pointers and suggestions for voluntary and community organisations wishing to improve support to black and minority ethnic disabled people; and some questions for funders and service providers to consider”