AOET International Co-ordinating Office Objectives
- Support/Facilitate implementing countries (Promote efficiency in planning, development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and prepare AOET Country programs and their staff for ownership, accountability and sustainability of projects.
- Fundraise and Fund individual Country capital projects (where country programs need them but do not have the resources to set them up)
- Recruit and deploy Volunteer teams to different country programs
- Provide Vision and Direction. (Custodian of Mission, Values, and Strategic Goals for AOET overall. Countries do those things for themselves, within the framework set by ICO. They also do all their own operational planning).
- Monitoring and evaluation of Projects funded by ICO
- Capacity Building for Country programs
- Start – and if necessary, Close Country programs.
- Hiring / Firing of Country Directors
Lessons Learnt
Due to the implementation experience of the care and support project; a number of lessons have been learnt:
- Caring for children’s needs involves more community training than the actual care for the children and therefore strengthening the community in such interventions is key to sustainable impact.
- People who access services at AOET come from very poor homes and are overwhelmed with the needs. Therefore any intervention that can bring about significant changes in their lives needs to be comprehensive to cater for the Physical (health…) Mental (psycho-social…), material (Empowerment programs so people can be self sustaining) and Spiritual needs of the clients.
- In addition, its quite difficult to have quality care and services without quality personnel. Dedication and commitment are very crucial in the HIV and AIDS care ministry.
- Over Dependency of patients on AOET or any other program can be fatal. Continuity of services offered in HIV and AIDS interventions will depend on how strategies to support patients to become self reliant at household level are handled and should ensure they have incomes that they rely on for sustainability.
Planning of interventions should involve all stakeholders because satisfying donor or partner interests is crucial but meeting the practical needs of the beneficiaries is of paramount importance.