'Co-operate to achieve results'

Saturday, July 24, 2010 (Daily Graphic Pg 19)

Story: Lucy Adoma Yeboah, Austria, Vienna
THE President of the Ghana National Association of HIV Network, Mr Victor Attah Ntumi, has challenged civil society organisations (CSOs) working in the area of HIV prevention to avoid competing among themselves and rather co-operate to achieve results.
He said although such CSOs had the objective of working for the prevention of an epidemic which was causing the world so much pain, the leadership of some of the organisations spent much time competing with each other to the detriment of the work ahead.
Mr Ntumi said this on Thursday at a workshop in Vienna, Austria, as part of the six-day 18th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010) which ended yesterday.
The topic for the four-hour workshop was: "United Nations General Assembly (UNGASS) Monitoring and Evaluation: How can we improve on the involvement of community organisations".
Presentations were made by representatives of CSOs from Ghana, Nigeria, Libya, Kenya, Uganda, Philiplines, among other countries.
The representatives and other participants at the workshop had the opportunity to share experiences and ideas and also learn from each other.
Some of the umbrella health related CSOs in Ghana are GHANET, National Association of People Living with HIV (NAP+) and the Coalition of NGOs in Health.
They are involved in the expanded technical working group meetings where they send feedback from the community to the regions upwards to the national level as part of the UNGASS process of monitoring and evaluation process every two years.
As part of his presentation, Mr Ntumi, who was part of the 15-member government delegation, explained how the Ghana AIDS Commission (GAC) and the UNAIDS served as the lead organisations in the fight against HIV and AIDs in Ghana and the role they played to support the CSOs to operate.
Touching on the challenges the CSOs faced to achieve greater involvement, the GHANET president identified what he called the 'Five Cs' and mentioned lack of co-ordination among CSOs; lack of commitment on the part of some leaders; lack of connections; cost which hampered operations and also unnecessary competition among the CSOs.
To achieve set objectives, Mr Ntumi called for co-ordinated efforts and networking, adding that there was no need for individual CSOs to try and outdo each other for individual gains.
"The work is enormous and there is no way to try to prove a point individually whiles we do that together," he stressed.
He pointed out that just as in Ghana, CSOs in other African countries, especially those who dealt in health related issues, had a greater responsibility to help in the fight against HIV and AIDS and all the other diseases, which claimed the lives of large numbers of the people each year.
"Our main job is to help improve on communities’ efforts to reduce diseases and poverty, " he pointed out.
For his part, the main facilitator of the workshop, Mr Innocent Liaison from the Africa Civil Society Organised (AFRICASSO) headquartered in Senegal, pushed for much civil society involvement in the UNGASS process to get systems in the individual countries to function properly.
He said if the need be, the leadership of the CSOs should protest if they realised that inaccurate reports were being sent to the UNGASS but not just sit down and endorse everything.