COMPASS AFRICA PROJECT
Coalition to build Momentum Power Advocacy/Activism Strategy and Solutions(COMPASS) Africa is an innovative, data-informed and audacious North-South collaboration of civil society organizations working in the global North, and in East and Southern Africa. The project is anchored and led by civil society coalitions in Malawi, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Under COMPASS, these three country coalitions work with partners in the global North to gather, analyze and use evidence and data to shape strategic activist and advocacy campaigns.
COMPASS works via four areas: Building the strength and influence of Africa-focused civil society coalitions; using data, information and analytics to advocate for comprehensive, effective treatment and primary prevention programs that lead to epidemic control; defining priority issues and ambitious change agendas; differentiated service delivery, combination prevention, human resources for health, sexual and reproductive health and rights, key and vulnerable populations and more.
COMPASS aims at strengthening coalitions to develop and deliver advocacy campaign agendas. MANASO is implementing the project for a period of one year (January to December 2020), and there are two campaign goals that fall under this project, and these are:
Goal 1: To advocate for an increase in the allocation of the total grant towards community HIV prevention interventions from 12% to 20% in the 2020 – 2022 Funding Request Cycle using locally generated evidence.
MANASO is implementing the project in 3 districts; Mzimba, Salima and Zomba. Currently MANASO has effectively managed to achieve campaign goal 1 through our participation in the NSP development where we managed to push for PrEP allocation on AGYW which has now been included; and PEPFAR through Peoples CORP, where as part of civil society we pushed for PrEP and we won. This means from our work plan as MANASO we have managed to achieve campaign number 1 which is to advocate for the inclusion of PrEP in the next 2020-22 GF funding.
Way forward: Seeing as most of the global fund programs on the ground are not monitored by the community, MANASO will use campaign goal 2 to strengthen community-led monitoring (CLM) and accountability capacities on Global Fund Programs in-district. The issues that will come out of campaign 2 will be used to inform CCM discussions at national level.
At the moment MANASO is in the process of developing Global Fund CLM tools that will be used to track Global Fund projects on the ground and hold decision makers accountable; the issues raised will also positively influence programming of Global fund projects to speak to the needs of the recipients/grassroots.