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Evaluation and development for the National African HIV Prevention (NAHIP) programme

Duration: April 2009 - June 2012

We have been commissioned by the African Health Policy Network (AHPN) to provide evaluation and development (E&D) services to NAHIP, the National African HIV Prevention programme for England. The NAHIP programme includes 19 community based organisations and is co-ordinated by AHPN. The programme is funded by the Department of Health.

The overall aims of our NAHIP E&D programme is to increase the effectiveness, efficiency and equity of HIV health promotion intended to contribute to a reduction in HIV incidence through sex between African people in England. We hope that as a result of our programme, those responsible for the planning and delivery of interventions will have a greater knowledge of health promotion need, programme configuration and intervention performance. Our NAHIP E&D programme is divided into three main areas of work: strategy & workforce development; basic research to inform future campaigns; and monitoring and evaluation.

NAHIP strategy & workforce development
This area of work predominantly concerns what HIV health promotion should be trying to achieve with African people in England. It includes a dedicated website called KWP in practice which brings together the collaborative planning framework The Knowledge, The Will and The Power and the accompanying planning Handbook. We also provide training to health promoters in the NAHIP partnership, to increase engagement with the KWP framework; additional briefing sheets on specific topics pertinent to KWP; two whole-day knowledge transfer and planning seminars; and consultancy with NAHIP staff and partners within NAHIP.

Basic research to inform future campaigns
For NAHIP we are currently working on a community based research project concerned with African people in serodiscordant relationships. This study involves in-depth, face-to-face interviews with African people living in England who are in relationships where one person has diagnosed HIV and the other does not (ie. HIV serodiscordant). When the final reports of this project are launched in November 2011, we hope to descibe the needs and experiences of the first two priority groups for interventions according to The Knowledge, The Will and The Power. These priority groups are people living with diagnosed HIV and people in sexual relationships with people with diagnosed HIV.

NAHIP monitoring & evaluation
We must be confident that the interventions which we include in our programmes are effective and efficient at bringing about their intended aims. Individual interventions require specific evaluations to judge their performance, and to inform future programme planning. We intend to extend a growing body of evaluation data by assessing the impact of a range of NAHIP interventions including the 2010 NAHIP conference and the roll-out of the Muslim toolkit training. Sigma also co-ordinate and report on the monitoring all NAHIP direct contact interventions across the partnership. Our NAHIP monitoring and evaluation workstream is described in more detail elsewhere.

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