MASERU- The National AIDS Commission has assembled stakeholders to jointly identify interventions that have shown a significance influence and impact in the direction of attainment of the national policy goals termed Best Practices on HIV and AIDS.

According to NAC Acting Chief Executive ‘Manneheng Mopeli the Best Practices will be documented with the purpose to inspire improved HIV and AIDS programming, widen the knowledge base of what works, prevent repeating errors and stimulate new and better ways of HIV and AIDS programming.

She explained that the Best Practices are not an evaluation as an evaluation assesses or verifies whether a project/programme has attained its objectives, has failed or succeeded; while a Best Practice document validates that a project/programme has reached a certain level of practice as per its original goals.

She said the documented Best Practices will form part of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) Report on HIV and AIDS to be held in New York in June this year.

According to Phumla Moleko, Section Head Advocacy and Communications at the Commission, the Best Practices are documented to avoid duplication of efforts within same target area by sharing information, lessons learned and promote knowledge exchange to adapt effective strategies of intervention within specific environments.

She pointed out that sharing lessons learnt would create synergies for scaling-up and enhancing the effectiveness of local and global responses to HIV and AIDS..

The most important criteria for the documentation of the Best Practices were outlined as effectiveness, ethical soundness, relevance, cost effectiveness, replicability, innovativeness and sustainability. She said these would enable them scrutinize whether the programme meet the criteria and whether it qualifies to be a Best Practice. “She then urged the public, programme managers, policy and programme decision makers to help them identify those for the benefit of the country. Delegates were told that a team of reviewers would conduct field interviews on the qualifying Best Practices and following the documentation process a validation workshop will be conducted where stakeholders would authenticate the findings.

Present at the workshop were 30 stakeholders drawn from different governmental and non-governmental departments such as Sentebale, LENEPHWA, UNAIDS, CARE-Lesotho, Ministry of Finance and Development Planning to name but a few.