Community-based org’s benefit from small grants

12 Oct, 2020 - 14:10 0 Views
Community-based org’s benefit from small grants Gladys Gumbo, the Project Lead with Zimbabwe Young Positive addressing participants at Friday's meeting

The Sunday Mail

Emmanuel Kafe

COMMUNITY-based organisations advocating the well-being of young people, women and those living with HIV are benefiting from small grants from the HER Voice Fund.

The grant is managed by the Global Network of Young People Living with HIV on behalf of Global Fund and ViiV Healthcare. The Zimbabwe Young Positive is the country lead in Zimbabwe.

The HER Voice Fund is targeting adolescent girls and young women who are also high-risk groups when it comes to HIV infections.

In Zimbabwe, the HER Voice Fund is supporting six community-based organisations namely, YES Trust, ROOTS, Youth Engage, Hope for Adolescent and Youth, RNCYPT and Africaid.

At its inception in Harare on Friday, official representatives of HER Voice Fund said these were small grants that have been set aside to support meaningful community engagements and leadership of adolescent girls and young women and amplifying their voices in order to inform the decision that affect them.

“We know that these populations are at risk of contracting the HIV virus and we want to ensure that we end HIV looking at this target population and lessening the infections rate in adolescents and girls.

“This fund is there to have the voices of young women sharing their lived experiences when it comes to HIV especially with the ones who are living with the virus,” explained HER Voice Fund ambassador Tambudzai Magwenzi.

She also added that young people were at risk of contracting HIV and Aids.

“The infections are high in young people and when we are comparing between males and females, we see that infections are high in young girls and women more than boys and young men. When we looked at that, we then said why not have young people talk about what’s going on in their lives. That’s when we came up with the HER Voice Fund so that we could hear their voice,” she said.

The HER Voice Fund offers small grants to organisations in 13 priority countries, including Zimbabwe, where Global Fund is investing to contribute to the reduction of HIV incidence among adolescent girls and young women.

The fund has four streams which include gathering information and stories for adolescent girls and young women advocacy, training and mentoring for policy and advocacy work, adolescent girls and young women engagement in policy and advocacy and monitoring and accountability.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe Young Positives (ZY+) program officer and HER Voice Fund Country Lead, Gladys Gumbo, said the HER Voice Fund would empower the young women and girls through improving access to health services under young people friendly environments.

“As the ZY+, we got the grant as the country lead, most of our work is in grant co-ordination, finding out the problems that they are facing when implanting projects.

“This grant is going to improve access to services through empowerment programs where the young people will be engaging in training sessions, through creation of mobile clinics and one stop shops where they can get all the services,” explained Gumbo.

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