P2Z: Lessons Learned in Building Youth Capacity

“Where there’s clarity, there’s coordination and good understanding.”

 

Peers2Zero (P2Z) was an official partnership that began in 2016 between the African Young Positive Network (AY+) and Paediatric-Adolescent Treatment Africa (PATA). 

 

 

Through PATA’s project REACH (Re-Engaging Adolescents and Children in Care), they became aware of the growing number of HIV+ children who had survived into adolescence, and who were facing high levels of stigma and a gap in services and support when accessing health services. This led to finding a regional partner to work with them on addressing the specific needs of HIV+ adolescents and youth in Africa.  The purpose of the partnership was to draw upon the expertise of AY+ in working with national networks of young PLHIV to promote improved connection and engagement of young HIV-positive peer supporters with their local networks, sensitize and train health care providers who are members of PATA in providing adolescent friendly stigma free services.  At the same time, to use the expertise of PATA in working in consortium to strengthen regional and local networks of young PLHIV, and support the development of peer supporters to work within health systems where they could be engaged in both the planning, delivery and evaluation of services that affect them. The ethos was to form an equal partnership between the two networks, recognizing that many times adolescent- and youth-serving organizations are not provided the opportunity to participate fully, make decisions, and lead. The end goal was to create a platform to inform change from the experience of young people accessing HIV services in the region. Through their mutual networks (PATA with a network of health providers and AY+ with a network of peer supporters), they could complement each other’s work to improve service delivery from their particular vantage points. The overarching structure of the consortium was a Steering Committee made of PATA and AY+ members.

This model was successful in two important ways: as the impetus of a more structured coordination mechanism throughout the region, and capacity-building of peer supporters to be able to influence change from the local to global level.

At the onset of P2Z there was a monthly coordination meeting of youth networks for PLHIV. However, the involvement of P2Z helped to strengthen the purpose of the meetings, resulting in more adolescent response around the region, better sharing of resources, and a untied advocacy agenda. As there are many funders and projects in the region investing in the leadership and capacity building of youth networks, these meetings have been crucial to coordinating the efforts.

With regards to peer educators, working jointly with members of AY+ and PATA, structural relationships were built at the localized clinical level between youth and treatment staff. This brought more young people into facilities, and also strengthened the capacity of those peer educators to be stronger advocates for their health and the health of their peers. With these skills, those educators were able to link to national networks and raise issues of service deliver that they had witnessed on-the-ground, leading to discussions for policy change.

While P2Z made significant progress in the region with respect to coordination and capacity building, the experience of the consortium left many lessons learned for future partnerships of the sort:

 

Bridging capacity levels between organizations
Challenge: The consortium faced difficulties in jointly managing funds and activities due to differing capacities. PATA as the lead partner had not anticipated and had not made sufficient technical provision for the level of grant management support that the more nascent AY+ required, resulting in much time taken up by managing and following up on , reporting and financial compliance. At the same time, whilst encouraging leadership changes occurred within AY+, limited institutional structures to support the changes compromised agreements and the ongoing sustainability of the consortium.

Lesson learned: In order to be in consortium, participating organizations (especially if there are few) need to have somewhat similar levels of organizational infrastructure, such as policies, procedures, financial management capacity and governance. This was not the case with PATA and AY+, given the differences in the sizes of the organizations, their institutional histories, and their experiences managing international funding. In order to avoid unexpected capacity gaps, and to carefully design a consortium plan/proposal that incorporates sufficient organizational support and capacity building to adequately deliver on the project, an external organizational review of partners’ capacity strengths and weaknesses should be undertaken, with careful screening and ongoing monitoring and support. If organizations entering into consortium do not have the same level of infrastructure, then specific activities might be added to the grant for the more more-established organization to provide technical assistance to the organization in growth.

 

Clarity and consensus in the function of the consortium and responsibilities of its members
Challenge: Throughout the course of RCF funding, it became apparent that AY+ had differing understandings about the purpose and function of the consortium, and their roles within despite their being a very well defined MOU, with roles and functions well defined.

Lesson learned: In establishing a new consortium, especially with few members, it is important to reflect on the joint histories of the organizations – is there an existing relationship and level of trust? If not, then joint activities to determine the motivation for the consortium should be facilitated, and also consider its operational and leadership structure, lines of communications and decision-making. Additional activities should take place to build general buy-in trust among members in order to uphold these decisions. Critical questions need to be asked between partners to evaluate each organizations’ capacity related to financial management, programming, institutional structure and human resources. With this information, grant proposals may be submitted that speak to the strengths of the consortium’s members and provide opportunities for success.

 

Long-term investment in youth-led organizations to address power imbalances
Challenge: Many times youth engagement in decision-making related to HIV services and programming has been seen as sporadic and “tokenistic,” in that spokesperson youth are asked to represent the youth of Africa, however not given real power in influencing decisions.  PATA recognizes the need for a long-term investment in youth and adolescent organizations so that the realities of young people in Africa can be represented and considered. Additionally, many young people do not yet have the professional-level skills needed to lead organizations at the level necessary to qualify for and successfully use international funding.  Nor do they have equal power to advocate for their needs because of cultural structures.

Lesson learned: Strategic organizational capacity building needs to be built into projects working with youth-led organization. Such support needs to focus on the organization as a whole, not just the professional development of one or two members. Youth and adolescent organizations working in HIV could be surveyed in order to determine what structure of networks and/or consortium would work best to serve their needs, what type of capacity building they need, and what would be the value added of working in collaboration through a regional network.

 

Robert Carr Fund’s investment in P2Z was successful in that it brought to light many important take-aways about how to better support youth- and adolescent-led networks in the consortium model, and concrete steps of how to move forward in planning a different consortium model to better improve services for young PLHIV throughout Africa.