It takes all kinds…

A good partnership can turn a great idea into gold.

Partnerships in the AIDS response can start out like a story with a punchline — “A nurse, a sex worker and a politician walk into a bar …”

Jokes aside, some extraordinary partnerships have been formed in order to save lives and advance the AIDS response. The Wits partnership between the community and the government in South Africa is one such example. Wanting to reduce the rate of HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among sex workers, the Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (RHI) of the University of the Witwatersrand forged a novel partnership. They brought together the sex worker community from the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg, the owners of local hotels and civil servants from the Ministry of Health. Everyone realized they had a common interest in promoting health, and a practical strategy was developed.

Once a week, a sex worker will give her hotel room to a nurse, who will deliver outreach health-care services in situ. The process is supported by sex worker peer educators. In this way, sex workers and their clients in the building have immediate access to HIV prevention, STI and tuberculosis screening, sexual and reproductive health options, HIV testing and referrals for HIV treatment. The sex workers say the service is popular with their clients because it is provided in a safe and discreet environment where they feel comfortable using the health services that they otherwise would not seek out.

The programme’s partnership also extends beyond the building: data gathering and evaluation are supported by partners, including the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Other community partners provide legal support, life skills training and additional essential services.

The punchline of the Wits partnership is that it has been so successful that the South African Ministry of Health is expanding the programme to offer more health services to sex workers in other communities.

CREATING A CRITICAL MASS OF POWER

How do such partnerships come together? Professor Helen Rees, one of South Africa’s most well-known scientists and the head of Wits RHI, says that people figured out that “you don’t have to agree on everything” to become partners, and that with a common cause coalition and network building, results can happen at incredible speeds.

It hasn’t always been this way. In its early years, AIDS was portrayed as a disease of “the other,” affecting only certain groups of people. This made it easy for the epidemic to be ignored and stigmatized. Partnerships were indispensable for countering the high level of fear and misunderstanding surrounding HIV.

Embracing and expanding the concept of partnership was a revolutionary step, not only in the AIDS world, but also in the broader development sphere. It is now widely recognized that coordination and collaboration across a wide range of partners help to identify and use vital expertise more effectively, tackle and overcome barriers more quickly, and allocate resources more efficiently. Partnerships also increase awareness and knowledge, and they can create a critical mass of power and support that can help sway policy-makers and other stakeholders to take action.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

Nowadays, the overarching and unifying goal of enhancing access to HIV services continues to result in diverse collaborations. Money, sex, drugs, religion: what could be a more disparate hold, and domestic investments increased substantially, changing the dynamics of partnerships. With the growing awareness that a sustainable AIDS response couldn’t exist without everyone being on an equal footing, a new platform emerged: shared responsibility and global solidarity.

How AIDS changed everything — MDG 6: 15 years, 15 lesson of hope from the AIDS response celebrates the milestone achievement of 15 million people on antiretroviral treatment — an accomplishment deemed impossible when the MDGs were established 15 years ago.

The story continues atwww.whitetablegallery.org

Explore the first exhibition at The White Table Gallery which tells the story of how ‘things’ can have special meanings in the AIDS response.