Faculty, NGOs discuss AIDS relief programs in Africa
Mulugeta Gebru (speaking), founder of the Jerusalem Children and Community Development Organization, took part in the April 3 event, which brought faculty and grassroots programs to the table to exchange ideas.
BY CASEY LINDBERG
In a discussion hosted by the Haas Center for Public Service last Friday, Stanford faculty met with members of the Firelight Foundation, a private organization based in Santa Cruz that funds grassroots programs working to fight HIV/AIDS and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.
At the April 3 meeting, part of a two-day conference called "No Small Issue," more than 20 participants discussed how Stanford could collaborate with Firelight to study what makes a grassroots organization work. Firelight has access to the organizations it funds but does not have the research tools it needs to empirically study their effectiveness. Researchers at Stanford may be able to step in and analyze health and standard-of-living outcomes.
The impact of HIV/AIDS and poverty on children in sub-Saharan Africa is arguably the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today. According to the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS (JLICA), of the 15 million children living today who have lost at least one parent to AIDS, 12 million are in sub-Saharan Africa. A recent JLICA report explains that although myriad organizations are working to fight the epidemic, many of these efforts are misdirected, and not enough emphasis is placed on strengthening the families and communities that can naturally care for children in a way that external programs cannot.
"Families are the most important response to children affected by AIDS," said Firelight advisory board member Geoff Foster. He pointed out that some outside organizations may actually have a negative impact on communities' responsiveness to the epidemic, and what his colleagues want to know is how external funding can have a positive influence on grassroots efforts. "That's what we want to see, but we don't have a great deal of measures to actually see this," Foster said.
Wairimu Mungai, program director for WEM Integrated Health Services based in Kenya, spoke from her experiences where intended services were often not reaching the children due to a lack of coordination and sufficient funding. "Sometimes I wonder … [if] it was better to have even the community the way it was without all this effort," Mungai said.
This is where a partnership between Stanford and organizations such as Firelight could make a difference.
Peter Laugharn, Firelight's executive director, explained that his foundation is not equipped to handle the available data from the hundreds of organizations it works with. Because Firelight does not interact locally with the grassroots organizations it helps fund, it needs to collaborate with researchers who are able to look at outcome variables at the community level.
"We know a lot about our partners—how they work, how they think, what thwarts them, where they excel," Laugharn said. "But to say what the benefit is for children of what they do is several steps removed from our daily interaction."
Joel Samoff, a consulting professor of African studies and political science, explained that there is room for extraordinary creativity in the way such a partnership would work. "We don't have very many good models about funding research in a way in which part of the funding is at the community level and part of the funding is on the research side," said Samoff.
If Stanford researchers can work out an effective collaboration with the Firelight Foundation, there may be opportunities for research that could impact the lives of millions of children. Samoff echoed the optimism expressed by other faculty members in attendance by saying that such opportunities would allow researchers to "take advantage of the genuine interest and let our students excite us."
Laugharn and Sarah Kleinman, a Stanford alumna and 2009 Rhodes Scholar who serves as executive director of FACE AIDS, gave introductory remarks to kick off the symposium on April 2. A panel discussion followed that included Medical School faculty members David Katzenstein and Brent Solvason, as well as representatives from several organizations that are currently involved at the local level in a number of African nations.
Casey Lindberg is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.
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