Summer school students bring energy and enthusiasm: A group of the PDM students relax at the summer school opening function at the HB Thom theatre on 14 January this year. the function, which featured a performance of the Africa Institute's educational mini-musical Lucky the Hero! as well as musical performances, was a new addition to the programme. The rest of the programme included lectures on different aspects of HIV and AIDS and fun activities in the surroundings of Cape Town.

Knowledge and positivity no match for HIV/AIDS

The PDM and MPhil programmes are the most comprehensive HIV and AIDS training programmes in the world – a good reason why the Africa Centre takes so much pride in the prestigious academic programmes and the students. But the road is not over when the students graduate. The real value of these programmes becomes evident when they use their newly acquired knowledge and skills in their workplace. Greg Munro is one of the past students who are making a difference.

You are currently working as the Senior Regional Capacity Development Manager for East Africa TSF, the technical support facility for Global Fund grants set up by UNAIDS. Can you tell us more about your job and the background to it?

With the rapid rise in international funding for HIV, UNAIDS facilitated the establishment of technical support facilities (TSFs) to respond to the growing demand for short term quality technical assistance to scale up HIV and AIDS responses. There are five TSFs, including Eastern Africa (managed by the African Medical and Research foundation, AMREF) and Southern Africa (managed by a private sector organisation).

The TSF Eastern Africa is based in Nairobi and serves Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Eritrea. It provides services to national AIDS coordinating authorities, health and other ministries, in-country Global Fund partners, civil society organisations and private sector implementers.

Focus areas for support include topics such as strategic and operational planning, monitoring and evaluation, mainstreaming of HIV, organisational development, and costing and budgeting. In order to provide these consulting support services, the TSF has a pool of skilled regional and international consultants in the HIV planning, implementation and evaluation field.

In order to ensure that every country and the consultants operating in the country are kept up to date with rapidly changing dynamics, to ensure that countries can plan, anticipate and manage technical assistance needs and to develop and expand regional capacity (not always reliant on international capacity), a capacity development unit exists within the TSF, headed by myself.

My main tasks are to:
• Design and manage a comprehensive capacity development programme across the region
• Design and manage a country partner capacity development programme for implementers of Global Fund grants
• Strengthen the client-consultant relationship
• Design and manage a professional skills development programme for consultants
• Manage and mentor consultants and staff in the TSF development unit
• Quality assurance, networking and marketing

What do you enjoy most about your job?

The most enjoyable part of the job is imparting knowledge and skills to local role players. There is often a heavy reliance on international “experts” in Africa, and as a citizen of Africa I am proud to use my professional energy in trying to build our own capacity. The skills obtained in the MPhil course influence my approach to my position and the tasks I am responsible for.

What is your experience of the HIV/AIDS situation and how it is handled in Eastern Africa?

Eastern Africa is further down the natural history road of the epidemic, so they have lower prevalence rates today than was the case earlier. I personally find their approach to the epidemic to be mature with very overt leadership in the HIV field. Organisations and governments are very supportive of capacity building efforts.

What do you think are the most urgent issues regarding HIV that needs to be addressed?

The biggest challenges facing HIV in Africa are the mismatch between increased donor funding and in-country systems, i.e. country health systems are not always geared to manage large amounts of funding. We need to develop in-country systems as an integral part of donor funded HIV programmes to ensure longer term sustainability.

Another area is the development of civil society organisations to share the implementation burden with government (an excellent example of this is Zambia). Mainstreaming HIV into all government services remains a poorly understood and implemented concept and also needs further input. Finally, given the training/capacity development component of my job, I hope to maintain contact with the Africa Centre in the future.

It is people like Greg who makes all the planning, preparation and research of the academic programmes worth it. He is an inspiration to many and the Africa Centre is proud to be associated with someone who is so positive and motivated to tackle and triumph over the pandemic.

• If you wish to contact Greg, you can email him at greg@sybaweb.co.za