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Introduction
Some 250 delegates attended the
2002 Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Workshop on Children
Affected by HIV/AIDS in Windhoek, Namibia,
from 25-29 November 2002. This was the
most recent in a series of bi-annual regional
workshops, the previous workshop being
held in Lusaka in November 2000.
In general the purpose of these workshops
has been to bring together stakeholders to
reinforce awareness of the impact of
HIV/AIDS on children and their caregivers,
and to build commitment to action —
particularly at government level.
The theme of the Windhoek workshop was
“Implementing the UNGASS goals for
orphans and other children made
vulnerable by HIV/AIDS” (see panel). The
overall goal of this workshop was to support
the scaling up of action for orphans and
vulnerable children (OVC) at country level.
The specific objectives were:
- To review progress towards the
achievement of the UNGASS goals at
country level, and toward the
commitments made by countries at the
Lusaka OVC Workshop in 2000;
- To explore good practice in
implementing large-scale action to
achieve the UNGASS goals;
- To develop a clear vision of the way
forward, and make commitments to
action, at country and regional level.
The workshop was convened by the UNICEF
Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office
with technical and financial support from
the USAID, SIDA, NORAD, the International
Save the Children Alliance, UNAIDS, Family
Health International and the Government of
Namibia. As with the previous workshops a
steering committee comprising of the cosponsors
was established to plan and
oversee the meeting.
The countries invited to attend were Angola,
Botswana, Burundi, Comoros, Eritrea,
Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar,
Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda,
Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania,
Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Each country was invited to send a team of
seven members representing government,
national NGOs, UNICEF and other OVC
stakeholders. A request to include young
people in the teams was withdrawn when it
emerged that the workshop would clash
with school examinations in many countries.
In addition to these country teams, a number of delegates were invited in a
supporting role — for example as technical
experts, moderators or rapporteurs — but it
was emphasised that non-country
delegates should not dominate the
discussions. On the whole this was
successful.
The main output of the workshop was the
country action plans — a list of
commitments which each country team
made to accelerate and focus action in
their respective countries in order to achieve
the UNGASS goals in their own countries.
Some countries participated in a similar
exercise at the Lusaka workshop, two years
earlier, and this represented an opportunity
to revisit and update their action plans.
The workshop adopted a “building blocks”
approach to support country teams in
drawing up these action plans, including:
- Asking each country team before
the workshop to produce a brief report
outlining progress in their country towards
the UNGASS goals;
- An opportunity to hear presentations by
all the other participating countries on
their progress toward the UNGASS goals;
- A 'Sokoni' or market-place where each
country could display and “sell ” their OVC
interventions to other delegates, who
could decide what to “buy ” for
adaptation and use in their own
countries, so providing an informal
means of information exchange on
experiences and practices;
- A series of five theme groups focussing on
one or more of the UNGASS goals, each
beginning with a panel discussion on
good practice before moving to
breakaway groups to discuss critical
actions for rapid, effective, large-scale
action in that thematic area. The themes
were: access to education; access to
health services and nutrition; provision of
psycho-social support to OVC; access to
social services and getting resources to
community level; and protection of children's rights and combating stigma;
- A series of satellite sessions on technical
issues, including: monitoring and
evaluation of OVC programmes;
alternative care arrangements for
orphans without family support; the role of
faith-based organisations in the care and
support of orphans; the cost of OVC
interventions; and children living with
HIV/AIDS.
The working group sessions were
punctuated by plenary sessions which
allowed delegates to hear feedback from
the working groups they were unable to
attend, and presentations by technical
experts and dignitaries.
The country teams developed country
action plans on day four, and were given a
matrix to support this process. On the final
morning they were asked to present their
action plan to other countries for peerreview.
In parallel, an evaluation committee
designed a questionnaire and conducted
29 single and group interviews with
delegates to assess whether the workshop
had achieved its goals, and seek advice on
how similar workshops could be improved in
future.
This report does not attempt to cover the
individual country presentations, nor those
made by technical experts in the theme
groups and satellite sessions. However, most
of these presentations are available on the
attached CD-ROM.
Instead, this report aims to cover the main
points which emerged from each plenary,
theme group and satellite session, to
provide an overview of the depth and
content of the discussions, the nature of the
challenges being faced by children
throughout the region, and examples of
how individual countries are responding.
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