Stepping into the office today was a welcome to official meetings from beginning to end. I was invited to a meeting to review and tease out activities and tasks from the BLC work plans of the Migration Corridor, Southern African Development Community (SADC) and annual Swaziland work plan. This lasted till after noon with lots of brainstorming. I learnt a great deal on each of these projects, their deliverables, and the intricacies of implementing each of the objectives as well as the opportunity to contribute a bit to the planning. The BLC migration project would be focusing on building the capacity of SADC to handle global funds as well as carry out intervention to truck drivers as a migrant population and their communities. The Road Wellness centres (RWC) is a unique strategy that the prevention team would be utilizing and which was a new knowledge for me. We would be visiting one of these sites during my stay and would sure have a lot of information to share in the coming weeks.
Another key learning was that the BLC project and south Africa in general possess one of the largest pool of funds on HIV in Africa although the level of HIV intervention is still yet to reach its optimal stage probably because of the difficulty in harmonizing all the various SA in-country projects knowing that each of these SA countries have different guidelines and policies on HIV implementation right from HIV prevention to Care and treatment.
Thereafter, Mathabo, Naume (the MSH communications officer) and I had an orientation meeting with Scott Dalessandro (Communications Associate of JHU-CCP) and Carla Visser (MSH HIV/AIDS Communications Coordinator) on the K4Health website called the Southern Africa HIV/AIDS regional Exchange (SHARE) as they took us through each of the components. The website is actually a pool of resources on HIV interventions happening in South Africa with several members comprising of individuals and organizations. The K4Health website is funded by USAID SA missions and is implemented by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (JHU-CCP) in partnership with Management Sciences for Health (MSH) and FHI 360. The SHARE features include eToolkits, free elearning/courses, online discussions, SHARE groups, User and organizational directories, social media and guest bloggers. One key thing I learnt was that organizations especially smaller NGOs who do not have the capacity to maintain a website can create a private SHARE group accessible to only its staff and members as well as derive all the benefits of a website. To join SHARE simply visit www.hivsharespace.net and open an account.
The activities of the day were worth the time. After work, Charles was patient enough to allow me shop for noodles and an SA-UK plug to enable me make use of the pressing iron I brought from Nigeria since SA uses a round plug. We could not find at the Hatfield shopping mall so we dropped off at one of the biggest shopping mall in Pretoria – Mainlin park. I was also able to get an earpiece for making Internet calls. Got home ready enough to take a deep tub bath and jump into bed.
Friday is usually known as a day for traditional dressing in Nigeria or casuals. But seemed it was strange in SA because when I did wear my outfit with a striking similarity with Anddy Omuolabi another Nigerian working at the BLC project in SA, we had eyes staring at us and giving their commendations, at a point I was wondering if we were truly looking nice as they said or if it was a negative statement?!!
We had another final meeting on the work plan. Thereafter I met with the OVC M&E team (Mathabo and Jabulani) to run through all the OVC tools of the Nigerian OVC project (CUBS) and see how they could borrow a leaf. An interesting thing about the BLC OVC project was that they had a large pool of funds allocated to each Civil Society organizations (CSO) they work with, each CSOs also seemed to be doing at least a 3+1 service area they could do best including educational support. Nonetheless, they still had some things to pick up on, example, they were yet to incorporate the Orphan and Vulnerable Children Index tool (OVI) as well as the Child Status Index tool into their toolkit. Mathabo was also the only M&E officer covering the whole of Lesotho but most intriguing was that they had only 11 CSOs who were to enroll 39,000 OVC in just one year that is one CSO would be responsible for enrolling approximately 3,500 OVC in just one year… possible??? Another disturbing information was that all of these children would be dropped at the end of one year and the CSOs would move on to enroll another set of OVC. Wow!! Although there was an interesting explanation of building the capacity of the local community to care for these OVC as a sustainability plan, it still sounded unusual. Questions like quality of service rendered and the importance of real impact in the lives of these children pervaded my mind for many days.
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