Meeting with NAC - Small steps

No system is perfect and as I have found out there are a number of limitations with the Monitoring & Evaluation system that is being used by the National AIDS Council (NAC). The issues are not going to be solved overnight but the meeting today was the first encouraging (small) step where myself and another VSO volunteer (working at the provincial level in Livingstone) on M&E were given the opportunity to present to the Director of M&E and other colleagues at NAC. We talked about our experiences to date working at district and provincial levels and what this means to M&E. And then set out how some of the weaknesses in a lack of understanding of what HIV stakeholders are doing in each district and the quantity and quality of the data being collected can be improved. At first from the faces of the people present it seemed that we had pushed a bit too far in our criticism but the comments back, particularly from the Director, were very positive and in agreement we what we had said; in one case adding further issues to the list. As a result we were promised a meeting with the overall Director General of NAC to get buy in to reallly start addressing these issues.