Supporting HIV Treatment Outcomes for Orphans and Vulnerable Children in Uganda

The Bantwana Initiative of World Education, in partnership with the prime contractor, Education Development Center (EDC), is the OVC technical lead under the USAID/Uganda Integrated Child and Youth Development (ICYD) Activity (2020 – 2025), which aims to address the health, safety, and education needs of Ugandan children and adolescents to enable them to reach their potential. The ICYD Activity has three mutually reinforcing objectives:

    1. Children and youth have improved learning outcomes;
    2. Children and youth are protected, safe, and healthy in their homes, communities, and learning environments; and
    3. Youth practice positive behaviors and make informed decisions about their lives and relationships.

The USAID/Uganda ICYD Activity is delivering targeted technical assistance (TA) to seven national partner organizations across 44 districts to implement proven family-centered models of support that mitigate the risks and impacts of HIV, violence, and COVID-19 on more than 230,000 children and caregivers living with HIV and other vulnerabilities.

The ICYD Activity contributes to Uganda’s HIV epidemic control goals by coordinating and delivering integrated health, education, and social protection packages aimed at improving HIV treatment and resilience outcomes for children living with HIV and expanding prevention services to reduce HIV risk for vulnerable children, especially girls. Within Uganda’s COVID 19 context, the USAID/Uganda ICYD Activity is deepening capacity of national partners, community volunteer structures, and local government to use digital tools for quality training, coaching, and mentoring to strengthen quality service delivery and data-driven programming to improve outcomes for children.

With the Government of Uganda (GOU) and technical support from the USAID/Uganda ICYD Activity’s support, ICYD national partners:

    • Ensure continuity of treatment and progress towards viral load suppression for children and adolescents living with HIV
    • Layer parenting, early childhood development, HIV and GBV prevention, and nutrition education on economic strengthen interventions to strengthen family resilience and coping skills;
    • Deliver prevention programming that empowers and amplifies the agency of children to prevent violence, with a focus on sexual violence prevention, especially for girls; and
    • Layer HIV and violence prevention programming on home study groups during school closures.

In just the first year of activities, the USAID/Uganda ICYD Activity has supported its national partners to deliver comprehensive services to 136,848 OVC and caregivers from 45,810 households, and community HIV-prevention services to 21,598 children. ICYD’s support has also improved viral load suppression for C/ALHIV from 79% to 88%, an important milestone towards achieving Uganda’s epidemic control goals.

ICYD’s capacity development efforts also include preparing four national partners to pass the NUPAS and become direct USAID OVC recipients by October 2022, and supporting the GOU to strengthen the building blocks of holistic national case management system aligned with the country’s new National Child Policy. This involves strengthening the training and certification process to bolster capacity of the child protection/social welfare workforce to deliver and coordinate HIV and GBV/VAC prevention and response services, and strengthening linkages between Uganda’s National Child Helpline, District Action Centers, and community-based para-social workers (PSWs), including scale up of WEI/Bantwana’s proven Closed User Group cellphone network to improve timely response and follow up to ensure continuity of support for children at community level.

This project is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this web page do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States government.