Love in Action Ethiopia (LIAE) has been working in 497 districts of eight regional states in the country since 2001, focusing on seven thematic areas including education and skill development, health and nutrition, capacity development, economic empowerment and good governance.
Twenty years ago there were critical challenges such as low understanding about HIV, low level of knowledge and attitudes towards HIV, shortages of services, budget constraints, low political attention, sub-standard services and information, low awareness of health facilities, serious shortages of health materials, etc. Due to this, the community was less supported, and the demand for services was weak. As a result, in our specific project target areas, the prevalence of HIV was the highest in the country – including the prevalence in the rural areas. The stability, capacity, and safety of HIV affected and infected community/families/individuals was significantly low.
LIAE’s staff and community members do community mapping. This practice draws on local people’s knowledge to explore social problems, opportunities, and questions, as an integral part of its project design, implementation, and evaluation.
The best part of our work is… empowerment of communities who are living in the hardship areas – the most at-risk, vulnerable, and underserved communities.
But now, after 20 years, PEPFAR support has strengthened us to work on vast and deep creation of services for HIV and delivery of standardized services in target regions, which has resulted in meaningful reduction of prevalence of HIV, especially in the most at-risk areas of the country, by improving the safety and stability of the affected families.
Some of our major achievements through PEPFAR include:
Meaningfully strengthening our organizational and technical capacity
Provision of life-saving HIV care and treatment services to the most at-risk populations like key populations, adolescent boys and girls, orphans and vulnerable children and their caregivers
Shifting from irregular and less organized HIV intervention approaches to targeted approaches to deliver effective treatment and care to our clients
One of the key fondest memories of the organization is the impact we have seen of the implementation of our business development approaches. The organization business development model focuses on innovations that are linked to meaningful participation of the community, including inbuilt-sustainability improvement actions that smoothly safeguard self-reliance and self-ownership, strategic partnership, and inclusive (not only integrated) program implementation.
Love in Action staff crossing a river carrying commodities to remote locations
Love in Action, Ethiopia
Years as a USAID/PEPFAR partner: 18 (16 as a sub partner and 2 as a prime)