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Towards a comprehensive, consistent, objective, verifiable and comparable method by which communities measure their progress in dealing with HIV/AIDS and other challenges.
Introduction
The experience of the Constellation is that in all parts of the world communities have the capacity to respond to the challenges that they face. As a result of this insight, the Constellation works with communities to stimulate this Local Response to challenges such as HIV/AIDS and malaria.
In the approach and the methodology used by the Constellation around the world, communities act to address those challenges, they learn from those experiences and they learn from and share with other communities that have taken action. The Constellation introduces the community to a Learning Cycle based around a Self Assessment framework that allows the community to analyse its current position and to base an action plan around that self assessment. In addition, it works with the community to sustain the Learning Cycle in a consistent and a persistent fashion using an approach characterised by the acronym SALT. We call the combination of the Learning Cycle and the SALT approach the Community Life Competence process. (When it is applied specifically a particular challenge, we call it the ‘AIDS Competence process’ or the ‘Malaria Competence process’.)
In one step of the learning cycle, the community reflects on the progress made to date, learns from that reflection and adapts its actions on the basis of what it has learned. When this methodology is applied within the context of the Self Assessment framework, the community looks at its progress over a comprehensive set of activities related to the challenge in a way that is objective, verifiable and comparable.
The Community Life Competence Process is unusual in the emphasis that it places on the value of learning and sharing among communities. The learning that a community gains from its experiences provides useful lessons to other communities working with the same or related challenges. And this implies that the learning from other communities is, in turn, relevant to the first community. In other words, each community has the possibility of learning from the experiences of other communities and of sharing what it has learned with those other communities. There is a potential to learn-and share. When community learning is based around the Self Assessment, the learning experiences may be shared on a comparable basis.
These ideas will be explored in more detail in the sections that follow.
The Community Life Competence Process
In the western/developed world in particular, learning by experience has been superseded by the concept of learning from and through experts. (We may well receive the expertise of experts through books, courses etc.) It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to define education as the transfer of expertise to pupils by experts. In the eyes of many people around the world, the concept and practice of learning through personal or communal experience has come to be devalued. We need to be clear and specific here. This position does not seek to devalue the effectiveness of medication in dealing with HIV/AIDS or malaria, for example. Nor does it seek in any way to devalue the methodology that has led to the development of such medication. This position does assert that to protect ourselves from threats such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, personal and communal learning must be developed and applied. The fruits of medical and scientific expertise are essential to deal with many of the challenges that communities face around the world. What we are advocating here is the recognition of the value of both approaches to deal most effectively with these challenges.
The undervaluation of learning by experience means that when ANY individual or community uses a learning cycle to learn by experience, it needs support both to start and to sustain them. In the Constellation, we support communities as they apply the learning cycle with an approach characterised by the acronym SALT. We call the combination of the learning cycle and the SALT approach the Community Life Competence Process.
The Learning Cycle
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SALT
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The Self Assessment Framework
The Self Assessment framework is based on a set of 10 practices that provides a comprehensive community response to HIV/AIDS.
The first 6 practices relate more particularly to HIV/AIDS. The second group of 4 practices is more general and and apply to any challenge that a community faces. When a community assesses its capacities to respond to HIV/AIDS using this framework, it will reflect on a remarkably wide range of actions by which it can strengthen its response to the pandemic.
The 5 levels of the Self Assessment framework
When a community carries out a Self Assessment with this framework, it assesses itself between level 1 and level 5 for each of the practices. These levels are defined in generic terms in the following way.
These generic definitions give a clear progression for any practice from a level of awareness of an issue at Level 1 through to dealing with it effectively as a normal community practice at Level 5. The distinction between each of the levels is specific. The progression in capacity to respond is precise.
Level 1 is about knowledge: the recognition that the issue exists.
Level 2 is about reaction: we respond when an issue arises or when we are challenged
Level 3 is about action: we begin to take responsibility for our own actions.
Level 4 is about planning: we begin to take action in a consistent and persistent manner.
Level 5 is about ‘lifestyle’: our response to the challenge has become part of the way that we organise ourselves in this community.
In the Self Assessment framework, this generic definition of levels has been applied to each of the 10 practices. As an example, here is the definition of the 5 levels for the practice ‘Acknowledgement and recognition’.
In this diagram, the generic definition of levels is compared directly with the ‘translation’ used for the practice of ‘Mobilising resources’.
Here is an example of a completed Self Assessment
Priority practices and target levels
In order to focus activities, the community then chooses 3 priority practices and decides on a target level for each of these priority practices. The practices are chosen so that they move the community from its current position toward its dream.
At least in the early stages of working with the Community Life Competence Process, the idea is that the targets should be modest so that they can be achieved in a short time. This could be as little as 3 months. As this way of working becomes part of community life, the community may come to set the targets and to review them as part of the annual planning process.
When it uses a short time frame, the community sees relatively quickly that is can DO something and that the very real progress that it makes serves as a stimulus to make further progress.
Here is an example of a completed Self Assessment with targets.
We now ask the community to think about what the current and target levels mean for each priority practice means in their specific situation. For example, how do they interpret level 2 and level 3 for the practices of ‘Acknowledgement and recognition’ in the context of their community at this time? The thinking process is moving from the general to the specific. Here is an example of a response.
So the generic measures of Knowledge, Reaction, Action, Plan and Lifestyle have been translated to a very specific meaning for a particular community for the practice of ‘Identify and address vulnerability’.
When the community arrives at these specific statements, it is natural and straightforward to discuss the actions that the community can take in order to move forward. And this discussion produces the action plan.
The Action Plan
Plans mean different things to different people. They don’t need to be complicated. But they need to be complicated enough so that people take action. It is likely that different communities need different levels of detail in their plans to make sure that they carry them out. The challenge for a community (and a facilitator) is to decide the level of detail that a group needs so that it will act.
We would suggest that as a minimum a community needs a list of the actions that it is going to take. The community then needs to be confident that it doesn’t to write down the following:
Does the community need to decide WHEN an action is going to take place? If it does not do this, will it come to the end of the plan period without taking action?
Who in the community is going to take the action? If this isn’t written down, is it possible that people will assume that someone else is going to take the action so that by the end of the plan period nothing has been done?
What resources does the community need to take the actions that it is planning? If this isn’t discussed when the actions are being planned, is it likely that things aren’t ready when they need to be ready?
Here is the plan for one priority practice:
Plan to measure progress
A community needs to keep a check on the progress that it is making in carrying out its action plan.
The community needs to needs to keep a check on the progress that it is making because it is much harder to DO things than most of us imagine. It is all too easy for us to find good reasons why we should not do things. That is particularly true for things that are new or things that are different.
In the context of the Constellation, there is another reason why the community needs to keep a check on the progress that it is making. The experience of a community as it progresses towards AIDS Competence is of value to other communities that are making the same journey. The community has a responsibility to share what it has a responsibility to share that experience with others. When we look at the experiences of communities in this light, the community on which we are focusing not only has the responsibility to share its experiences with other communities, it must also have the opportunity to learn from the experiences of other communities. But here we are concentrating on making sure that a community is able to share its experiences with others as effectively as possible.
In order to keep a check on progress, the community needs to reflect on how it is going to do this BEFORE it starts to carry out its plan. This is not something to be thought about while the actions are being taken (or even worse, after they have been taken). With a modest amount of early thought, the process of self measurement can easily become part of the actions themselves.
Each community will decide for itself what it needs to do to keep a check on progress. But it does need to make itself comfortable that it has ‘dealt with’ the following questions:
How do we know that we are making progress?
How and when are we going to check our progress?
How will we share our experiences with others?
Here is an example of a plan to measure progress.
What we are beginning to find in practice is that it is useful to consider these questions even before the action plan is made. Thinking about these issues can help a community to decide on its action plan.
This particular plan is an example of what happens when a community starts to measure its progress. It is concerned, in particular, to check that events happen and that the right people attend those events and that enough of them attend. When people become comfortable that they can organise and run such events, they become more interested to understand what happens as a result of their actions. Although these can be captured in terms of numbers (for example, the number of women who are generating income from their activities), the changes that are taking place in their community can also be captured by non-numerical measures, in particular stories.
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