Pact helps Vietnam cope with HIV/AIDS
To improve their efficiency more and more civil-society groups have turned to Pact with 32 civil-society groups across of the country’s 21 provinces having worked with Pact so far.
Pact is an international organisation with a US$44.4 million programme funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Pact has offered grants, technical assistance and capacity building to local partners’ pioneering HIV/AIDS initiatives since 2004.
In 2010, many civil-society groups have benefited from Pact’s 26 training courses on HIV treatments, promoting safer sex and managing finances and data. Pact brings partners together to learn from world-class practices as well as from each other.
From 2007 to 2010, Pact’s Vietnamese partners have raised the number of people they work with via community prevention initiatives from 6,205 to 21,345. Outpatient care for adults living with HIV has risen from 540 to 5,394, out of 21,780 and services for HIV-affected children from 116 to 1,807, out of 7,139.
Since 2007, civil-society groups have submitted 163 projects to Pact’s Local Partnership Initiative. Pact also fine tunes the best proposals and has operated 20 projects nationwide.
At Vietnam’s Innovation Day on HIV/AIDS Control on December 1, the Ministry of Health singled out the Vietnam Community Mobilisation Centre for HIV/AIDS Control (VICOMC, a Pact partner since 2008) for its breakthrough in strengthening grassroots HIV prevention in the northern highlands.
Pact works worldwide to support local solutions in health, the environment and livelihoods. Its current five-year HIV/AIDS program under USAID from 2006 to 2011 marks its first large-scale effort to support Government initiatives in Vietnam.