Three proposals granted in last year’s call
Three proposals granted in last year’s call
A total of 36 project proposals were submitted following Aidsfonds’ call for proposals on improving treatment and care for children living with HIV in Mozambique, Nigeria and South Africa. Society for Family Health, Zoë-Life Innovative Solutions NPC and N’weti Comunicação para Saúde were among the selected programmes.
With this call, we aim to find more children living with HIV that don’t know their status yet, and to find them as early as possible. We support civil society organisations to develop, implement and monitor an intervention model to find children exposed to HIV which are not found by the conventional health system approach. The international committee for this call for proposals selected the three programmes for three years (2019-2021).
Kusigata - Mozambique
Organisation: N’weti Comunicação para Saúde
This programme will make use of community structures such as referrals to testing and treatment; individual support through home visits; support groups and community dialogues. Field staff and health care providers will receive training on motivational interviewing. It aims to create demand of HIV services by (pregnant) women and children. Besides, the programme will work on improvement of quality of HIV services from a user-perspective, through implementing a social accountability tool called “Community Scorecard” at the level of the health facilities.
Kusigata is local language for support or warmth and refers to a community support approach towards children living with or affected by HIV, which is rooted in traditional systems of the communities in Mozambique. The programme will be implemented in three different districts of Inhambane province, where the HIV prevalence rate has increased worrisome.
The Kusigata programme is a consortium of two local Mozambican organisations N’weti and Mahlahle, who joined forces with the Dutch research institute KIT. This unique blend of expertise allows the consortium to use profound knowledge of the community context, to incorporate latest international evidence and establish a strong research component.
Enhancing Access of Children to HIV Services Using Existing Community Mechanisms - Nigeria
Organisation: Society for Family Health
The program will improve the capacities of existing heavily patronised informal health structures such as traditional birth attendants and drug outlets as well as effective community structures such as traditional and religious leaders, to identify and refer clients for antenatal care and HIV testing and counseling services in health facilities. It will also empower health facility staff to provide excellent quality HIV services, refer and track PMTCT and ART uptake. The project will promote health seeking behaviours among community members to access HIV services.
Society for Family Health jointly with Institute for Public Health work with context-specific community approaches with the aim to reduce the prevalence of HIV among children under 15 years and reducing mother-to-child-transmission in Taraba State.
Kidzalive@Home – South Africa
Organisation: Zoë-Life Innovative Solutions NPC
KidzAlive, that has been developed and tested by Zoë-Life, focuses on children and their families to support differentiated HIV, TB, and malnutrition care for children aged 2-12 years. It addresses case-finding of HIV, TB and malnutrition in children; psychosocial support to their caregivers; increasing children’s understanding of their illnesses using age-appropriate language and fun tools; capacitating health facilities and communities; and create child-friendly spaces in which to deliver HIV services.
KidzAlive@home aims to further support the national roll out of KidzAlive by implementing a community based differentiated model of care for children living with HIV in Ethekwini and Mgungundloovu Districts of KwaZulu-Natal. These communities have been reported to have the highest HIV prevalence in South Africa, are resource deprived and have high numbers of children who are at risk of HIV infection.