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6. Conclusion to report on orphans and vulnerable children
   Last updated: 29.06.02
 
Increasing numbers of children are being affected by AIDS, especially in East and Southern Africa. All aspects of the response to this epidemic need to be improved and expanded. In particular, there is a pressing need to care for increasing numbers of orphans and other vulnerable children within the community. Institutional care should be the option of last resort. Instead, attention should be concentrated on how to strengthen existing community-based OVC support activities and how to encourage the establishment of new initiatives.

This workshop focused on three main levels at which change is required to achieve scale-up, and the necessary roles of five diverse, key stakeholder groups.

Caring for increasing numbers of orphans and other vulnerable children places considerable extra burden on already stretched community coping mechanisms. However, community initiatives must lead the grassroots response wherever possible. More and better technical and financial support, as well as encouragement to community responses from CBO/NGO support providers, is much needed. But efforts will remain patchy and unsustainable if they occur without the effective plans, policies and support of national governments, international agencies and donors.

There is need for an expanded role of intermediary organisations to facilitate the development and expansion of community OVC responses. There is need for more intermediary NGOs and for existing intermediary NGOs to provide more CBOs and NGOs with quality support. Some community-oriented NGOs may, with support, be able to make the transition into intermediary NGOs. This will enable them to provide technical support and grants management to other NGOs, CBOs and OVC initiatives in their area.

Governments, donors and international organisations have a major role to play in developing an 'enabling environment' that is supportive to the development of community level responses. At the same time, community and facilitation level organisations have important roles to play and can actively participate in development of OVC policy at national and local levels, based on their field experience.

The key conclusions of the workshop are that stakeholders must be aware of their respective 'niche roles', act appropriately and work together. Policy/resource organisations should make greater commitments to the development of supportive OVC policy and commit more funding through intermediaries. The combination of technical support and appropriate funding provided by intermediary NGOs to community level organisations could go a long way to helping such groups reach more vulnerable children and perhaps expand their response into areas such as home care, income generation and effective HIV prevention.

Detailed recommendations are as set out in the three tables at the end of each of the three previous chapters (3, 4 and 5), and are based on the ideas set out in the table at the end of chapter 2.

Source: Expanding Community-Based Support for Orphans and Vulnerable Children
This is an extract from Expanding Community-Based Support for Orphans and Vulnerable Children , published by the International HIV/AIDS
Alliance with the Family AIDS Caring Trust, Zimbabwe, in 2002.

To view the whole report follow this link.

To download, complete with graphics, in pdf format (which requires Adobe Acrobat software to read it) follow this link (file size: 523 Kbytes).