The Daily Observer (Banjul)
Mam Ndegene Secka
30 October 2009
Banjul — The National Aids Secretariat (NAS) in collaboration with the UNAIDS and other stakeholders, on Tuesday held a one-day validation forum on Â'Three Ones ConsultancyÂ' at the Paradise Suites Hotel in Kololi.
Speaking at the ceremony, Nuha Ceesay, the UNAIDS country officer said, as the AIDS epidemic continues to spread, there has been a great increase in the global response. He said in the past, Aids advocacy for developing countries has focused largely on fostering leadership and mobilizing financial resources adequate to the scale of the epidemic. Â"Both of these focuses remain necessary but now that leadership and financial resources are more in evidence, attention is turning to the urgent questions of how to make the money work and how to ensure leadership can be genuinely effective in changing the course of the epidemic," he noted.
According to him, it is clear that there is urgent need to increase the capaciy of many developing countries to use the available funding efficiently and effectively. The UNAIDS boss also said that among the factors limiting the optimal use of domestic and international funds in many countries is the fact that government ministries, international agencies, community-based organisations and other players do not coordinate their AIDS interventions.
Instead, he added, they engage in parallel financing, planning, programming and monitoring. Â"The right hand does not know what the left is doingÂ" would apply, except there are many hands involved. Â"In september 2003, at the 13th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA), held in Nairobi, Kenya, a working group developed a set of guiding principles for improving coordination of national AIDS interventions,Â" he stated. According to him, representatives from donor and host countries and major international organisations formally endorsed the Â"Three OnesÂ" principles as follows and they agreed to collaborate on a number of steps to put them into practice.
The first one was; One agreed AIDS action framework that provides the basis for coordinating the work of all partners, secondly, One national AIDS coordinating authority, with a broad-based multisectoral mandate, and thirdly, One agreed country-level monitoring nd evaluation system. He noted that they called on UNAIDS to act as facilitator and mediator among all stakeholders in country-led efforts to apply the Â"Three OnesÂ" and to integrated monitoring and evaluation into national policies, programmes and reports. For his part, Alieu Jammeh, the director of the National AIDS Secretariat shed lights on the role of National AIDS Commission (NACs) in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The objective of the study, he said, is to obtain a comprehensive assessment of the current status of the implementation of the "Three OnesÂ" in 19 countries of West and Central Africa.
He added that this assessment should be the basis for all partners to determine future strategies aiming at better coordination of the national AIDS response. Jammeh noted that the expected results of the study will be a clear analysis of lessons learned and best practice strategies that should be replicated in order to further strengthen national coordination for the national HIV/AIDS response in The Gambia.
In conclusion, he urged all the participants to give their utmost contribution in order to give the assignment the due attention it deserves.
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