Strengthening Community Health

Also available in: Español

By: Constanza Armas

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund), with the support of the Community, Rights and Gender Regional Coordination and Communication Platforms, is organizing a Webinar Series to bring together various topics of interest to the Country Coordinating Mechanisms, as well as to the Principal Recipients and Sub-Recipients, in preparation for GC7.

The third webinar was held on 22 February and brought together a diverse global audience. The goal of this meeting was to strengthen community responses and place them at the center of primary health care and universal health coverage so that they can reach the most vulnerable and play an effective role in the fight against HIV, TB and malaria.

Susan Perez, from the Global Fund’s Community Led Monitoring Strategic Initiative (CLM SI), introduced some key definitions. She emphasized the importance of community systems in four areas where communities must take the lead and which are key to the Global Fund: Monitoring, Advocacy and Research, to understand barriers and improve access to health care; and Coordinated Work on activities that focus on engagement, capacity building, and leadership development.

These four areas work as a feedback loop: strengthening community response leads to better health outcomes, which in turn strengthens public systems. Research helps reduce barriers to health services, and advocacy accelerates the adoption of technologies and policy reforms to improve institutional and community response.

In the dialogue with civil society constituencies and other relevant stakeholders, emphasis was placed on the need to strengthen advocacy and grassroots work through various strategies, such as collecting context-specific information to guide local action (identifying gaps and data); building alliances with strategic organizations and community workers; strengthening leadership; engaging people living with the diseases and community organizations in all parts of the process; and seeking technical assistance from all available organizations in their countries, such as UNAIDS, States, other existing NGOs, among others.

Gilles Cesari, Fund Portfolio Manager for the Global Fund (Central Africa team), cited the example of successful civil society advocacy in Mali, which opened access to antiretroviral treatment (ART) between 2001 and 2004 and secured government funding since 2004.

Dmytro Sherembey, chair of the board of 100% LIFE, a Global Fund-supported nongovernmental organization that provides HIV medicines in Ukraine, said that “community must be at the center,” referring to work to improve access to ART and other essential services in the context of war. The activist said that in such an adverse environment, it has served them well to “learn by doing,” as they have also lacked water, food and other essentials. One of the services most affected was tuberculosis (TB), which had to be interrupted several times because of the war. “The community has been a great model: after the bombings, they continued distributing medicines,” he added.

They have focused on advocacy projects, capacity building and community engagement. They continue to work with and acknowledge the financial and technical support of the Global Fund. In this sense, their situation is similar to that of other countries that are not at war, but face enormous challenges in not only improving access to health care, but also in ensuring the enjoyment of the most basic rights.

Sherembey concluded his presentation with a call to hope: “After our victory, we want to work on community engagement at the legislative level.” With these words, he invited us to look beyond the present moment and to incorporate elements that will strengthen us for a nearer and better future.