Investing in Community Responses
The Global Fund Advocates Network - "Greater investment in community responses is needed to end AIDS. UNAIDS suggests that investments in community mobilization should increase threefold to 3%, and spending on social enablers should reach 8% of total expenditure by 2020. However, a recent survey showed that 40% of organizations tasked with implementing community activities reported a funding decrease since 2013.
(...) Alongside international funding partners, countries are also increasingly highlighting the importance of community responses in their national investment cases. South Africa’s HIV and TB Investment Case says that spending on community mobilization and other enablers needs to increase significantly.
This decline in funding is especially alarming because the community response is very successful in practice as many examples show. For instance:
- In Zimbabwe, individual women who are members of community groups have lower HIV incidence (Gregson et al., 2011). Funding women's organizations works.
- In Botswana, legal advocacy had a direct contribution towards the 90- 90-90 targets, ensuring that non-citizen prisoners would receive ART (BBC, 2016). Funding strategic litigation works.
- In Uganda, a community score-carding initiative led to a 33% reduction in under-five child mortality (Björkman, 2009). Funding community monitoring works." (Photo: United Nations Development Programme/Helen Clark in Mali/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)