The Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations (AFAO) and APCOM are pleased to launch a monitoring toolkit that gives communities and key populations the power to document their experiences with HIV services and analyse these data to advocate for improved HIV services.
The Sustainable Community-led Monitoring of HIV Services Toolkit recognizes the community’s critical role in shaping the delivery of HIV services using a well-defined, internationally accepted service quality framework.
The toolkit provides an overview of planning and implementing community-led monitoring (CLM), wherein the data can be collected and analysed by community members. It also helps strengthen the link between service feedback and resulting action and provides an opportunity for follow-ups for incidents requiring investigation, such as incidents of stigma and discrimination.
“Stronger community involvement will improve and open the access to HIV services for key populations,”
said Felicity Young, Principal Director for Sustaining HIV Services for Key Populations in Asia (SKPA-2), which led the development of the resource.
“The toolkit was designed in partnership with key population advocates and community-based organizations and informed by the learnings from the SKPA-1 program. Community-led monitoring data needs to be central to decision-making and policy implementation.”
Midnight Poonkasetwattana, Executive Director, APCOM added:
“The HIV response requires multi-sectoral partnership, with the community at the centre for the Asia Pacific region. All stakeholders must support key populations and people living with HIV to be empowered and capacitated to lead and monitor services, and ultimately improve their quality of life.”
Building on the lessons learned from implementing CLM in the first SKPA program, SKPA-2 will robustly engage communities to work with their national HIV programs to generate on-the-ground standard indicators that will feed into national evaluation frameworks and health management information systems, while promoting dialogue for HIV service improvement at the local level and enabling lessons to be learned across countries. As CLM can take various forms in different country settings, the toolkit avoids being prescriptive but provides guideposts, standard data collection templates, and general considerations.
The SKPA-2 program is being implemented by Principal Recipient AFAO with funding from the Global Fund in Bhutan, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka.
AFAO and APCOM expresses its gratitude to partners and collaborators, including Asia-Pacific Transgender Network (APTN), the Asia-Pacific Network of People living with HIV (APN+), the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW), and the Philippine NGO Pinoy + for their contribution to developing the toolkit. Gratitude to SKPA-1 partners: Save the Children Bhutan, the Family Planning Association in Sri Lanka, the Community Health and Inclusion Association in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Youth for Health Center in Mongolia, Burnet Institute in Papua New Guinea, Love Yourself in the Philippines, Estrella+ in Timor-Leste, and the Malaysian AIDS Council. Also, thanks to the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the Global Fund for their significant contributions.
