Background to our work

Background to our Work

Community Based Organisations (CBO's) are strategically positioned to be effective agents of positive change in the context of the HIV and AIDS epidemic here in South Africa. But the reality is that at present, small CBO's operating at community level in the Eastern Cape are not fulfilling their potential. They are notoriously weak and are generally not integrating smoothly with the formal government sector. The weakness of the CBO sector is a universal problem in South Africa. At a meeting of the provincial HIV/AIDS Coordinators of the Department of Health held in the year 2000, participants all reported that whenever small NGO’s and CBO’s were recruited to deliver services for HIV/AIDS and TB at community level, they were usually not capable of developing the organisational structures to carry the programmes, and were unable to manage the funds accountably. So it was decided that one of the greatest needs in the NGO/CBO sector was to increase the capacity of small, grassroots CBO’s and FBO’s and to assist them to develop the sound structures and systems needed to manage and sustain long term programmes in partnership with local government institutions and other donors. The result of this meeting was the National Department of Health’s HIV and AIDS NGO Funding Unit’s “Mentoring for Change” initiative which formally started in 2001.

The programme was set up specifically to search for an effective new way of building the capacity of CBO’s for an effective response to the epidemic, as conventional training programmes had failed to produce results at CBO level. The initiative began through a network of 9 NGO’s operating in 8 provinces (a group later known as the Mentoring Resource Network and soon to be based in Pretoria). Each participating NGO was funded to develop a pilot CBO mentoring programme. The Mentoring for Change partner NGO in the Eastern Cape was the Barnabas Trust. After the DFID sponsored research and analysis phase of the national programme, the Barnabas Trust’s mentoring framework and the materials that go with it (The New Tool Box series - see link), were adopted by the Dept of Health and all the other MRN member NGO’s as a common framework and foundation for mentoring CBO’s involved in HIV and AIDS related activities in association with the Mentoring Resource Network throughout South Africa. Since then, we have trained 14 other well established NGO's to use our mentoring framework and materials, and to date, approximately 103 HIV and AIDS related CBO's have either graduated from, or are being exposed to mentoring that is based on our framework and materials here in the E-Cape, and a further 25 are being mentored through the MRN in other provinces with funding from the Netherlands Government. Details of the groups we are currently working with can be found on the Map page.

Camilla Symes, (our Training Director), wrote the New Tool Box manuals for the Barnabas Trust in 2002 in partnership with the National DoH and with funding from DFID. The terms of reference for the series were developed through a process of broad consultation involving representatives from every level of the Department of Health, NGO’s, donors, CBO leaders and all of the founding members of the Mentoring Resource Network (MRN). A process which began with a Mentoring Programme Conference, held in Pretoria in March 2002 with sponsorship from the EU Capacity Building fund.

If you are interested to see details of the books, have a look at the Toolbox page and make contact with us at the address given.