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| A wall that promotes HIV/AIDS-awareness |
Lessons from an HIV project in India have provided the needed impetus to scale up Ghana’s response to the HIV pandemic. Through a South-South partnership and collaboration, officials of the Ghana AIDS Commission (GAC) drew lessons from the widely acclaimed Avahan project aimed at ultimate community ownership of HIV interventions.
Avahan is the flagship programme of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) for the prevention of HIV in India, and has been projected as a unique business model that brought private sector efficiency to a public health programme. The US$250 million project is said to be effectively complementing the Government of India's efforts to control AIDS through its own publicly funded National AIDS Control Programme (NACP).
Avahan was tasked to deliver to scale high quality prevention interventions to high-risk community groups in six high prevalence states and make an impact on the progression of the epidemic in these states. The first phase of Avahan ended in 2008 with impressive impact results on the coverage of high-risk populations, strengthening prevention infrastructure and the delivery of services.
According to Dr Richard Amenyah, Director, Technical Services, GAC, Ghana agreed to turn to India for technical support because there are similarities in the nature of the two countries’ epidemics. “Besides, there is strong evidence of significant successes in improving their HIV programming especially among key population”, he said. The India project, he added also had evidence of strong mechanism for coordination of a decentralised response.
Dr Amenyah who was speaking at the just ended 19th International World AIDS Conference (World AIDS 2012) held in Washington DC, said Ghana believed that strengthening South-South partnership and collaboration could enhance the relevance, quality and sustainability of technical support provided in building its local capacities and systems for a sustainable response. In a presentation titled ‘Africa-India HIV Learning Exchange: Approaches to Achieving Scale: The Ghana Experience’, Dr Amenyah said during the learning tour, Ghana’s focus was on how to improve on its coordination arrangements at the decentralised level, and also improve on high impact interventions being implemented in the country.
He said Ghana’s specific areas of interest during the tour were to learn how to improve on coordination arrangements at the decentralised level, improve on high impact interventions being implemented in Ghana, especially among key populations and build the country’s capacity.
Ghana had already applied a good number of the lessons learnt during the Learning Exchange tour to India. Four Technical Support Units (TSU) have been set up to enhance Ghana's decentralised HIV response and a strategic plan and an accompanying operational plan for Most At Risk Population (MARP) Strategy is also in place, Dr Amenyah stated.
In addition, District Implementation Committees (DICs) and rapid response systems had been set up. According to Dr Amenyah, the experience gained from the tour indicated that Ghana needed to reorganise the unique identifier systems set up for key populations, strengthen micro planning for improved programming and develop service standards and quality assurance systems
Before the tour, Ghana in 2010 undertook a lot of initiatives to develop an evidence-informed National Strategic Plan, spanning 2011-2015 and also evaluated the previous five-year plan. The country,he further said, also conducted an assessment of its implementation capacity for a sustainable response.
Dr Amenyah indicated that the Learning Exchange tour to India was a good exposure and ‘a great return on our investment’. “We were successful because the US government, through the United States Agency for International Development, GIZ, and Danish International Aid Agency, bought into our country plan and helped us to jump start the process with seed money”, he added.
- story by Rosemary Ardayfio, member of MCAN
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