Home-based caregivers are well aware that their contributions are vital to a community’s well-being, and are also clear about the fact that those contributions are not being recognized. Because of caregivers’ efforts, people living with AIDS are getting out of their beds and many are becoming caregivers themselves. Those HIV positive women who have become caregivers see themselves as living examples of what is possible with community support, even where anti-retroviral therapy is not available.

Caregivers are organizing women and communities to access basic services and creating savings and credit clubs through which they can collectively buy land. Because these women are a part of the community, they can put together demonstrations through mass organizing when campaigning for issues effecting their communities.

Caregivers are engaging in local-to-local dialogues, conversing with local leaders geared toward addressing a community’s need. These caregivers negotiate with local leaders to increase women’s access to resources such as land, housing and basic services and increased access to social services such as healthcare and education. Dialogues like these are an effective tool to enhance local governance and participation of grassroots women in local decision-making by stimulating dialogue with local authorities, relevant government departments, municipalities, NGOs, development partners, the private sector and the media.

Despite their successes, caregivers are still facing many challenges including governments not allocating sufficient government support to communities, lack of outside funding opportunities, continued stigma and discrimination and women’s inequality, which fuel the spread of HIV.

Community Watchdog Groups

Home-based caregivers have formed Watch-Dog Groups, as they continue to find widows and orphans being dispossessed of their marital and parental property when their spouses and parents die of AIDS. Caregivers educate women and youth on what documentation they must obtain in order to legally claim their husbands or parents’ land. Watch-Dog Groups continue to raise awareness of land policies through community outreach and prevent land grabbing by ensuring proper record keeping and challenging intimidation by families seeking to dispossess widows and orphans.

Empower Youth

Grassroots women are integrating youth, particularly girls into community-based organizations in order to promote their social and economic empowerment. As women living and working in the community, grassroots women are well aware that young women and youth cannot just be brought into a time-limited program and then sent off into the world if one wants to see positive results. Grassroots women train girls in income generation, knowing that empowerment is a lifetime process. Challenges are being faced by these groups because of the overwhelming number of orphans in every community, and a lack of funding to support youth-led groups and initiatives including peer learning for youth.

Local to Local dialogues

Local to Local Dialogues are reported to have been a very helpful tool for campaign members to empower grassroots women to begin to engage in a serious way with local government partners, and to raise visibility of the issues that matter most with communities around AIDS. This includes links between HIV/AIDS and Land which were not readily recognized by communities or local authorities prior to the Dialogues.

Members who have led Local to Local dialogues report that they have helped to build their own constituencies, to reach out to other grassroots women’s organizations, and particularly have helped to build relationships with local authorities and bring their issues into the public eye. The Local to Local dialogues have helped to empower women and improve their negotiating skills with local authorities, and have increased their access to the local power structures. They have also served to build relationships with other grassroots organizations and NGOs working on similar issues, and they have raised the visibility of the organizations in our network that have organized them. Local to Local Dialogues are a tool for community mobilization and building structures such as accountability mechanisms for monitoring government services related to HIV/AIDS– which is vital for responding to AIDS.

A challenge is to build strong enough community structures to overcome the intimidation faced by women who begin to talk about corruption and to demand transparency and accountability. Without on-going support for such efforts – constituency-building, community mobilization and convening dialogues with local authorities – the stop-start efforts may do more harm than good for our members.

Community Mapping

Mapping has been the process through which we have helped to move into countries and regions where HIV/AIDS is just emerging as an issue and where the issue is surrounded by silence, stigma and discrimination. Home-based caregivers are increasingly able to network with other institutions and organizations responding to AIDS, and are supporting the creation and strengthening of self-help groups responding to AIDS regionally and globally. As we expand further, community mapping has proven as a useful first step for bringing organizations into the Campaign, particularly those that are just beginning to identify or address HIV and AIDS as part of their development work.

Peer Learning

Peer learning within the AIDS Campaign has primarily taken place through Grassroots Academies. Several on the ground peer exchanges have also taken place among member groups to transfer the home-based care Alliance methodology, or on other home-bsaed care strategies (some supported by GROOTS International, other supported independently by our partners such as AJWS). Looking back over the past 5 years of peer exchanges, it seems likely that much more thought, preparation and resources will need to be put into peer learning processes if they are to be worthwhile, and we will need to work with leaders to think through how resource people are made available to the grassroots women who participated in the exchange as well.