New funding allows the Alliance to double its Caribbean work
30 October 2007
The Alliance has secured funding from USAID worth almost $4 million a year for the next three years, to respond to HIV in the Caribbean. This new funding will allow the Alliance to approximately double the size of its programme in the region and will both build on existing work and pilot new interventions, including community-based HIV counselling and testing.
The Caribbean environment is unique – while the islands are small, the HIV epidemic in the Caribbean is second in overall prevalence to that of sub-Saharan Africa. Initially, the HIV epidemic in the region primarily affected men who have sex with men and sex workers, but the epidemic is now affecting the general population and more women than men are living with the virus. The Eastern Caribbean Community Action Project (EC-CAP), which starts in November 2007, will primarily target those most-at-risk of infection and those who have been marginalised in society due to discrimination, homophobia and stigma, including 'men-on-the downlow' (bisexual men or men who have sex with men), sex workers, and people working in the tourist industry.
The programme will work in four Eastern Caribbean island nations – St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, and Barbados. The project’s strategic objective is to “enhance the response to the Caribbean HIV/AIDS epidemic” with the aim of:
- increasing the use of strategic information to promote sustainable, evidence-based HIV and AIDS community services in the Eastern Caribbean; and
- increasing access to HIV community services in the Eastern Caribbean.
The EC-CAP will build upon, deepen and expand the Caribbean Regional programme’s work currently funded by USAID. This includes the community animator programme, which uses an intensive, one-on-one outreach approach to target those most-at-risk of exposure to HIV with prevention and care and support messages and referrals. The programme uses a peer-led approach, recruiting animators from populations key to the epidemic in the region (including men who have sex with men, sex workers and people living with HIV), which helps their credibility and also means that they have an intimate understanding of the challenges faced by the people they reach. The new increase in funding will allow for a greater scope and scale of the animators’ activities; the Alliance plans to more than double the number of peer educators and provide them with more tools to employ a more holistic, case management approach to their outreach work. In addition, the Alliance will expand, enhance and systematise the technical and organisational capacity strengthening programme for local community based organisations.
The project also introduces two new elements. Firstly, the strategic information component will use qualitative research to:
- identify barriers to services for key populations;
- identify effective interventions to change behaviour;
- analyse success factors to allow for evidence-based scale-up and replication of effective programmes and approaches; and
- build local capacity to conduct research and better use data for decision-making.
Secondly, the project will pilot community-based counselling and testing in at least one island with potential for expanding this service to other islands over the life of the project, depending on the pilot’s success.
Joining the Alliance are two outstanding partners – the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco who will lead the strategic information component. They bring a breadth of experience in research and developing innovative behaviour change programs in community-based HIV prevention and care programmes with sex workers, men who have sex with men and mobile populations both domestically in the US and globally. IntraHealth International will provide both short and long-term technical assistance in the piloting of the community-based counselling and testing, having already successfully piloted community-based counselling and testing in different African countries, as well as support the palliative care aspects of EC-CAP.
