CMP brings all hands-on deck to guarantee the wellbeing of every CLHIV
Since 2019, the world has seen a significant drop in HIV funding and this has worsened with the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this current context a holistic approach is needed to reach young people with the information and services they need to protect themselves from HIV and to enable them to exercise their sexual and reproductive health rights “UNAIDS, Communities at the Centre, 2019.
It is in this light that on January 15, 2022, the Children Momentum Project Manager (CMP) had a working session with the staff at the HIV Pediatric clinic and Church Coordination Office (CCO), CMWA & IDF- (3 Community Based Organizations) to reorganize their interventions.
During the meeting, the hospital staff together with the CMP team brainstormed on ways to avoid duplication of efforts and ensure optimal use of all the resources available to support children and adolescents from all implementing partners. At this meeting, it was realized that the facility could hardly know all the resources available for their facility to support children and adolescents nor the complete package of support from each of its partners. This made planning for the facility difficult.
To address these gaps, the team agreed to have weekly coordination meetings with partners where they will plan weekly activities and ensure needy children are assisted adequately. With such restructuring, it is clear that the synergy put in place by CMP will benefit every child and ensure they get the best quality of care at the HIV Pediatric Clinic at the Regional Hospital, Bamenda.
This move did not leave the staff indifferent as explained by one of its APS, Tita Pascaline. “Truly we have had several partners supporting CLHIV activities, but they were not coordinated. CMP has been an eye-opener as it has helped us to see how to bring our resources together in order to obtain quality care for all the children. With this approach, we will guarantee optimum health to all the children we work with”.
The CMP project will continue to follow up to ensure this new practice is retained and eventually scaled up to other 15 project sites.