Culture and HIV/AIDS

A website on Culture and HIV/AIDS is currently being developed. Below we feature summary information about Creative Exchange’s current project activity in this area.

HIV/AIDS: The Creative Challenge

Engaging culture and creativity in HIV/AIDS prevention
 

HIV/AIDS – The Creative Challenge is aiming to make HIV/AIDS strategies more effective by enabling policymakers, development practitioners and NGOs internationally to develop new and more sensitive methods of working with local cultures. It been developed with the support of Healthlink, the UNESCO/UNAIDS joint programme on A Cultural Approach to HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care and more recently the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

The project is a process that builds dialogue and exchanges knowledge through reflective workshops between policymakers, practitioners and civil society, and which gathers and shares evidence on best practice in using cultural approaches to HIV/AIDS. Work of this kind has been described as like ‘a social vaccine’ because it helps to build community engagement and participation, it works sensitively with local cultures and communicates with local people in ways they can relate to.

During Phase 2 of HIV/AIDS: The Creative Challenge Creative Exchange worked in two cluster regions – Vietnam and Kenya. Around 55 policymakers, practitioners and civil society representatives were involved in the project activities. We gathered data on 10 case studies in Kenya, Vietnam and Cambodia.

The project was well received in both regions and we are currently extending the ‘circle’ of research and networking clusters to two additional regions (likely to be South Africa and the Caribbean). We aim to share practice and knowledge between all four regions, so building a diverse exchange of knowledge and views at policy and practice level in four regions, which may be useful to the formation of international policy.

Features of this stage – which is being funded by DfID - include an ongoing programme of networking and policy/practice dialogue on the issue of culture and HIV, and capacity building in the use of cultural approaches and monitoring and evaluation in Kenya, South Africa, Cambodia/Vietnam and the Caribbean. As an example of how this might work at a regional level, the Kenya group has now decided to set up its own networking group to facilitate this process and we would like to see how we can support this model and build on it in other regions. We are aiming to link this work in with other organisations to maximise impact (e.g. AIDS Portal)

The process is evolving outputs including a set of Findings Papers, advisory materials and case studies. We hope to develop a publication and series of web resource materials in 2007-8 which will provide support and guidance to those interested in developing a cultural approach to HIV/AIDS. The first of these papers, What has Culture got to do with HIV and AIDS?, Is available to download from our partners Healthlink at http://www.healthlink.org.uk/resources/findings.html

For further information please contact Helen Gould - hgould@creativexchange.org