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1. Introduction to Building partnerships
   Last updated: 29.06.02
Building Partnerships: Sustaining and Expanding Community Action on HIV/AIDS
A report on the International HIV/AIDS Alliance’s capacity-building programme on strategic alliances.

“Building partnerships is about working with others to achieve what we cannot achieve on our own.”

Reference: “Pathways to Partnerships” toolkit, International HIV/AIDS Alliance, 1999.

1. Introduction

HIV/AIDS shows little sign of losing its momentum as the pandemic nears the end of its second decade. According to the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organisation, HIV has already infected 50 million people around the world. More than 16 million have died, and new infections continue in both the most affected countries and in parts of the world previously spared the brunt of the pandemic.

Fortunately, even in the poorest countries, there are important and impressive signs of success in responding to HIV/AIDS. Countries like Uganda, Thailand and the Dominican Republic have reversed trends in the midst of serious epidemics, while Senegal, the Philippines and others have prevented epidemics from taking off. It is difficult to demonstrate or replicate the exact causes of these successes, but clear patterns emerge. In all these countries, widespread community mobilisation has complemented leadership and action from governments, with each reinforcing the other. In addition, all these countries have benefited from “multisectoral” action on HIV/AIDS. Responses included those not just from Ministries of Health and health-focussed community groups, but from women’s organisations, youth groups, economic development ministries and others.

For more than a decade, the key international technical agencies involved in responses to HIV/AIDS have called for “multisectoral” responses, and over the past five years this is increasingly complemented by calls for “partnerships”. But beyond the rhetoric, how can organisations and institutions make it happen, in a way that has real impact on the epidemic? How can the handful of successes in Thailand, Uganda and the Dominican Republic be replicated more broadly?

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance is a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) established in 1993 to support community action on HIV/AIDS in developing countries. The Alliance channels technical, financial and managerial support to partners it calls “ linking organisations” which are NGO support programmes situated in thirteen different countries in Africa, Latin American and Asia. In turn, these linking organisations catalyse and support local NGO and community responses to HIV/AIDS.

The Alliance and its partners must do more than simply start up and support good community programmes. For community work by NGOs to be successful and sustainable, it is also crucial to encourage and build NGO skills in partnership building. The impact of even the best community work is limited by the broader context within which programmes are delivered. Partnerships with governments, churches, businesses and the media can help NGOs and community groups to shape that context, for example by decreasing discrimination against people living with HIV.

The impact of community work is also limited by the number of people that NGOs can reach. These numbers can be increased by leveraging the involvement of other institutions, especially those with regular and direct access to large populations, like schools. Finally, resource flows for community HIV/AIDS work are unpredictable. For long-term financial stability, local NGOs and community groups need to diversify the sources they draw on for resources, and whenever possible learn to tap into the resources managed by their own national and local governments.

For these reasons, the Alliance tentatively began an effort to encourage and build the skills of local NGOs to work with others. First efforts began essentially as training in “public relations”. Through this the Alliance discovered that NGOs often needed to be convinced that partnerships were even necessary, let alone central to their success. Ultimately this lead to the development of entire programmes to build commitment and skills in “partnership building” work.

The Alliance learned that conscious efforts to build multisectoral partnerships can influence and improve the context of community work as a whole. This can be achieved by training local NGOs and community groups to reach more people directly themselves through replication of training programmes locally. This can help leverage financial, human and political resources that help them sustain their work. At its best, partnership building becomes integral to NGO operations – inseparable from strategic planning, programme implementation, impact evaluation and organisational development.

Over the course of this learning process, the Alliance and its own NGO partners developed a wide range of training methodologies and tools, as well as programme models for training around partnership building. This collection of training methodologies and tools contributed to the development of the Alliance’s first toolkit ‘Pathways to Partnership’ as a way of reaching a large number of groups at low cost. This report is designed to synthesise what the Alliance has learned to date and to share some of this learning with a wider audience. It begins by providing the background to the Alliance’s work in partnership building, then summarises some of the lessons that have been learned. It concludes by sharing the Alliance’s recommendations for NGO support programmes, donors and policy makers.

What building partnerships means
In practice, building partnerships is different for every NGO – depending on their specific needs, priorities and projects. However, it may include working with:

  • Local government departments National AIDS programmes

  • Community radio stations Lawyer

  • Farmers’ leaders Midwives groups

  • Traditional leaders Newspapers

  • Rotary clubs Human rights groups

  • Factory owners Foundations

  • Priests, mullahs or monks Women’s clubs

  • Local philanthropists Business leaders

  • Advocacy NGOs Civil servants

  • United Nations bodies International donors

  • Presidents Influential individuals

  • Social workers Arts groups

  • Youth groups Health professionals

  • Local councillors Academics

  • Police Churches, mosques or temples

  • Traditional healers Politicians


Reference: “Pathways to Partnerships” toolkit, International HIV/AIDS Alliance, 1999.

What are the benefits of building partnerships?
  • Access to people and places

  • Influence

  • Good ideas

  • “In kind” support

  • A helping hand

  • Money

  • Knowledge and skills

  • Political support

  • Practical support

  • Lessons learned


Reference: “Pathways to Partnerships” toolkit, International HIV/AIDS Alliance, 1999.

Source: Building Partnerships
This is an extract from Building Partnerships: Sustaining and Expanding Community Action on HIV/AIDS, published by the International HIV/AIDS
Alliance in March 2000.

To view the whole report follow this link.

To download, complete with graphics, in pdf format (which requires Adobe Acrobat software to read it) follow this link (file size 453 Kbytes).