Reviewing HIV and AIDS

For much of this week I was at VSO HQ Zambia as part of the team reviewing the work of volunteers working in the field of HIV and AIDS over the last 12 months. We poured through reports, picking out activities, achievements and challenges that fellow volunteers had listed. The breadth of our HIV and AIDS work in Zambia is significant, ranging from treating patients in hospital wards and hospital management to fundraising and advocacy roles for NGOs and CBOs. I hover somewhere between all of this trying to coordinate many of these activities at the district level in Mazabuka; in technical terms called ‘response management’. Aside from attempting to neatly summarise all of the volunteer efforts, we had to identify recommendations for VSO to take forward. A number of representatives from placement organisations carried out a similar exercise and then we came together to agree our combined recs. The differences were minimal in our views. Of the areas that we settled on the ones most relevant to my work are: strengthening the relationship with the Zambian National AIDS Council (NAC) drawing on our own volunteer experience of working with NAC; and reintroducing the HIV and AIDS advocacy function at VSO focusing on issues such as inconsistent sex education in the school system.