News from the Constellation for AIDS Competence

1. The approach is perfectly applicable to cities at different stages of development (HIV/AIDS budget of San Francisco is almost ten time of the National HIV/AIDS budget of Haïti..). However we need to ensure that, during the discussions, participants are able to capture the principles of an intervention from a well-developed city, more than its coverage and magnitude (related often with funding).
2. Distance coaching for the preparation of cities representation should be replaced by a real face-to-face coaching. A facilitator who is familiar with the AIDS Competence approach and particularly with the Self-Assessment tool and has the necessary facilitation skills needs to be identified or trained in advance. It will avoid to have city delegations to be ill-prepared or not coming with a proper Selfassessmentt prior to the workshop.
3. People are coming to exchanges ideas, good practices and their successes. Therefore we need to focus the workshop on round tables (Peer-Assist) and development of Knowledge Assets. The presentation of the approach (ACP) should be side-lined and we should avoidtheoreticall presentations on Knowledge Management and even on ACP itself. The approachwouldd "speak" through the facilitators themselves and the methodology used during the various exercises of the workshop.
4. The mix between technical people (those who really own the experience) and political representatives (in that case the Mayors) must be well designed. One option for their interaction could be to invite political representatives at the end of the workshop (Open day) to endorse the work (city Action Plan) or the recommendations. We should be verycarefull when inviting political representatives to participate directly in the exercises as they can influence the openness of the debates. The facilitation issue is key.
5. We got support from Emory University students whose functions were: to facilitate and note during the peer-assists, and to translate as we had at least 4 languages Englishh,Spanishh,Portuguesee andFrenchh). It was a very efficient voluntary collaboration and students were also learning a lot during all the sessions; their comments and remarks were very valuable during thedebriefings. We should ensure a better preparation for them (in term of facilitation skills) before the workshop, but their dedication was extremely motivating.
6. For the organization of future workshops, we need to separate the logistic team from the facilitation team: various and nice events were organized for the participants, mainly on evening. Because of that, many facilitators'debriefings were shortened. In addition, this team needs to be able to take the necessary decisions affecting the internal organization of the workshop (equipment, workshop settings, calling speakers...) and to be sure that these decisions are effective. Finally, in term of facilitation - it is common sense but not common practice - the speaker of a given session cannot be the facilitator of that session!

Most of the cities represented in Atlanta are willing to continue the exchanges between themselves and beyond. Already during the workshop, some cities like Mexico and Denver have committed to further collaborate on specific issues. Port-au-Spain and Curitiba offered their support to San Pedro Sula (Honduras) and Quito (Ecuador) to mobilize resources and plan for future interventions. However, there is now an issue for the City-AIDS project to be able to follow through these next steps. CIFAL Atlanta (as the other CIFAL all around the world) should play the role of the "dating agency" facilitating further collaboration and exchange. This role is expected by participant cities as they were requesting training of facilitators, support for the documentation of good practices, support to measure impact of their interventions and of Knowledge sharing and support to networking. The latter includes development of ews and Website so that cities stay in touch on particular issues.

As CIFAL Atlanta does not have the capacity and the resources, currently, to provide all these services, they will certainly need to partner with entities like the Constellation for AIDS Competence. Director of CIFAL Atlanta is willing to develop such follow up programe and he certainly has the possibility to raise part of the necessary resources; American cities and institutions may be interested in developing such decentralized cooperation. UNITAR & UNAIDS will play the role of brokers, and beside technical support to the program, can facilitate resource mobilization with institutional donors.

After the first workshops of the City-AIDS project, Curitiba (August 2003) and Lyon I (October 2003), the Atlanta workshop has shown the interest of cities to develop partnerships and extensive exchanges on HIV/AIDS and other development issues. The challenge for the CIFALs would be to keep up with such momentum without falling in the "trap of financial and technical assistance"! They need to clarify their role with regard to facilitation, networking services, quality assurance and monitoring of learning activities. Even if they are formally "training centers" CIFALs do not have that capacity and need to develop/create/strengthen partnerships with appropriate institutions.

CIFAL Lyon is currently preparing a second workshop of that sort, with mainly francophone cities. Lessons from Atlanta will be used to further improve efficiency of the workshop, and in particular the political commitment vis-a-vis city plan of action.

Full report of the Atlanta workshop will be soon available.

# posted by Luc Barriere-Constantin : 1:56 PM