Positive Mothers
on The Road Less Travelled (Cameroon), 29/Aug/2010 12:24, 34 days ago
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I was lucky to be part of a learning exchange workshop held by NAFI (AIDS fighters) in Ndop a week ago. This was organised by NAFI and VSO as an opportunity to share their experience in implementing the community based organisational development process. Essentially this is similar to the organisational development process of which I am part with my organisation, IDF, however instead of capacity building with a local NGO it is at a community based organisation level such as support groups for people living with HIV and AIDS.During the workshop we were introduced to some of NAFI’s other projects, one of which is the “Positive Mothers” project. This is a project funded by VSO which supports mothers who are HIV positive. The raison d’etre for this project was that NAFI was seeing that many children were dying before the age of 2, and that a significant number of these child mortalities were children who had mothers who were HIV positive. One of the reasons for this was that the positive mothers were unable (either financially or lacked the knowledge) to provide proper nutrition to their babies. Therefore NAFI stepped in with the positive mothers’ project andprovides them with funds to start income generating activities in order to be able to earn an income and support healthy nutrition for their children. In addition, the group acts as a support network and education is also provided on topics such as sanitation, breast-feeding and nutrition.Although all the mothers participating in the project are positive, only 2 babies are positive. Therefore NAFI is trying to ensure that the mothers have the proper skills to safely breastfeed their children to prevent mother to child transmission.Me and the two other IDF representativesThis project is still in its pilot phase but I anticipate that it will continue on as there were over 150 mothers identified for the project and who were interested in joining, sadly only about 50 could participate. I hope that funders recognize projects like this one which are conceived from the grass roots level where community members identify problems they face and work together with organisations to find solutions to improve their lives.One of the support groups we visited
