2013 has already brought many exciting changes for the reproductive health community, including the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University (IRH). But this year also means the close of our six-year USAID-funded project focused on Fertility Awareness-based Methods (FAM).

Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health's new website

It was in the spirit of continued scale-up that we asked ourselves what we could do to better preserve our projects’ legacies and encourage partners to carry on the work of expanding family planning options globally, including FAM. Re-evaluating the impact of our most globally-accessible housing place for this legacy—our website—was one solution.

Today, we value websites as a place to share messages related to our mission and what we’re doing in the world. We like inviting people to engage with our work and implement our strategies, curriculum, best practices, etc. by visiting our website to learn more. Having this portal for downloadable resources and materials has been amazing for our global health community. It has taken collaboration and information-sharing to the next level of “instant communication.”

Although much progress has been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, we still have more work and learning to do.

We have learned over the last decade that HIV prevention efforts must be targeted. Even in countries where there is a general epidemic, interventions for key populations are critical and could have a significant impact on the epidemic as a whole.[1]

For this reason, it’s important to learn more about programming best practices for key populations as well as develop robust systems to effectively monitor and evaluate these programs.

If you are interested in learning more, check out two new eLearning courses on key populations: Designing HIV Prevention Programs for Key Populations and M&E Guidelines for Sex Workers, Men Who Have Sex With Men, & Transgender Populations-National Level.

The Designing HIV Prevention Programs for Key Populations course on the Global Health eLearning Center

The Designing HIV Prevention Programs for Key Populations course provides field staff and country implementing partners with best practices in designing and implementing a comprehensive package of HIV services that meet the specific needs and circumstances of different population sub-groups.

Key populations are distinct sub-groups within the general population who are at higher risk of exposure to HIV, who engage in highly stigmatized behaviors and who are often marginalized in their own societies and thus have reduced access to health care and other public services.

Bringing about real change in the area of global health is a hard task and requires a great deal of resources. Often bringing for-profit entities to the table can open a plethora of assets that might not have been available otherwise. My recent post, originally appearing on the Southern Africa HIV and AIDS Regional Exchange (SHARE) Blog, talks about how a public and private partnership is hoping to get real results in the HIV prevention world.

Announced this month, the collaboration between the world’s largest youth-focused HIV and AIDS awareness and prevention campaign, MTV Staying Alive Foundation (MTV SAF) and the world’s largest condom brand, Durex. This comes at a pivotal time in HIV prevention; with more funding being allocated towards biomedical interventions, prevention has been pushed to the back burner. However the emphasis on HIV prevention is still an intricate part of moving towards a HIV-free generation. MTV SAF and Durex are giving the power of creating HIV prevention and creative sexual education programs into the hands of those it affects the most; youth.

MTV and Durex Are in a Relationship

MTV SAF’s mission is to produce ground-breaking, original content that delivers vital HIV prevention messaging to a young global audience. Along with producing global, free to use and distribute service announcements, videos and documentaries, MTV SAF funds grantees to do HIV prevention work worldwide. These grantees are young people running grassroots prevention programs in their communities, they receive funding, training and mentoring to have a sustainable program to prevent HIV. 

At the Global Health Knowledge Management Share Fair, Stacey Young from USAID's Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning discussed the importance of local knowledge, and how the curated knowledge base needs be be accessible to practitioners in the field.

This post originally appeared on the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative (GHKC) Blog. Basil Safi presented the Strategies Against Flu Emergence (SAFE) program at last month's Global Health Knowledge Management Share Fair, and how it's not always necessary to create a new tool to manage knowledge. Using Indonesia as an example, he illustrated how galvanizing a local team to optimize an existing tool can make life-saving knowledge accessible to those who need it most.

Stacey Young, Senior Learning Advisor at USAID's Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning, remarked that the knowledge base needs to be more than accessible to local partners, it needs to be created at the field level. 

Strategies Against Flu Emergence (SAFE) is a program created to support USAID/Indonesia’s Avian and Pandemic Influenza (API) Program and the Government of Indonesia’s National Strategy for Avian Influenza (AI) Control and Preparedness for Human Pandemic Influenza. In addition to a range of prevention activities at the local level, the program uses state of the art KM and social media tools to promote public-private partnerships, good poultry farming practices, improved biosecurity and hygiene behaviors at farms and markets, and improved care-seeking behavior for AI. 

During the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative's Knowledge Management Share Fair on April 16th in Washington, DC, I discussed that a key objective of the SAFE program was to facilitate coordination among partners by sharing important health information that is targeted for program managers and other decision-makers. In order to achieve this, SAFE taps into the potential of digital technology and create an online platform as a tool to share knowledge and communicate experiences for AI and Pandemic Influenza Programs in Indonesia.  

Since it launched, this collection of Avian & Pandemic Influenza resources has been one of K4Health's most popular online toolkits.

In its process, SAFE did not wish to create a new tool, but rather to optimize the already existing online platform under the USAID-funded Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs. In this endeavor, Indonesia has become a pioneer in which documents on Avian Influenza and Pandemic Influenza are carefully selected, stored, and shared among users. No less than 160 documents have populated the sites from different organizations in both Bahasa and English, and as SAFE is entering its final months, it is ensuring the continuation of the process by formally handing over the eToolkit to a KM technical advisory group made up of government and local NGO members. Representatives of these institutions will be granted special access to upload their own resources as they become available, so that the toolkit remains a living and dynamic platform through which all stakeholders can share the latest and most important information.  In February 2013, this eToolkit was the 8^thmost visited toolkit within all the K4Health online toolkit resources and continues to receive a high degree of traffic each month, with the average visitor reading 3.4 resources per visit.