The PEPFAR Local Capacity Initiative Supports a Coalition of Civil Society Organizations Serving Key Populations in Uganda

Author(s): Katherine Andrinopoulos, Eve Namisango, Tory M. Taylor, Annie Glover, and Mary Freyder

Year: 2020

Abstract:

The Local Capacity Initiative (LCI) strengthened the capacity of civil society organizations (CSOs) to support policy advocacy, with the ultimate goal of improving health services for key populations affected by the HIV epidemic. The United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funded the initiative from 2013–2018 to help local CSOs create an enabling environment for PEPFAR’s objectives.

Under the LCI, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked in Uganda between 2015 and 2018 to strengthen the policy advocacy capacity of CSOs that worked with men who have sex with men, transgender women, and sex workers and develop the capacity of public health officials to consider gender and sexual diversity issues. MEASURE Evaluation, which is funded by the United States Agency for International Development and PEPFAR, conducted an evaluation of LCI Uganda between 2017 and 2018.

This brief summarizes LCI’s efforts to develop organizational capacity through coalition building in Uganda. Additional briefs summarize the main interventions that LCI employed to create an enabling environment for HIV policy advocacy, implement the community scorecard strategy to improve HIV clinical services, and the methods that the evaluation team used to study the efficacy of LCI’s work and measure change resulting from it.