News from the HIV Capacity Building Partners Summit in Nairobi, Kenya

On the second day of the first ever Regional HIV Capacity Building Partners Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the key issues that continued to dominate the conversations in various sessions was sustainability.

Many speakers noted that despite a mild increase in organizational capacity building efforts by donors, governments, and nongovernmental organizations in the Eastern and Southern Africa region, the documentation and dissemination of these efforts and their effects on HIV & AIDS programs and other health programs and systems remains limited. Apparently, several factors have contributed to this situation.

First, the group noted that evaluative research for questions of program sustainability were primarily based on the objectives, work plans, timeframes and measures of sustainability that had been developed by individual projects. In most cases, these projects were donor funded and had their own agenda and hence did not take an organizational-wide approach in their approach to measuring sustainability. They just focused on the project deliverables.

News from the HIV Capacity Building Partners Summit in Nairobi, Kenya

Sub Saharan Africa still remains the unenviable epicenter of the global HIV and AIDS epidemic. Over the years, the region has witnessed intensified emergency efforts to expand access to HIV treatment, prevention, care and support. These efforts now call for renewed commitment to strengthen the requisite organizational capacity to plan, implement and sustain effective interventions.

This week, 225 government, donor, academic, civil society representatives, and People Living with HIV/AIDS, coming from 22 countries in Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa, are meeting in Nairobi to take stock of progress, achievements and lessons in HIV capacity building, share best practices and innovations, and also plan for future efforts to strengthen the organizational capacity of local implementers.