Publication in Globalization and Health -- Zambia HIV Sustainability Framework Application

A heads up about an interesting publication by a Dublin-Lusaka-London team, which uses the Sustainability Framework to look at CBO work in HIV/AIDS in Zambia.

Apart from stroking my fragile ego when I saw such an interesting use of our model, this paper achieves a number of things:

• substantially, anyone interested in HIV work at community level, will be interested in the case study it presents;
• methodologically, this is a great qualitative and systematic use of the Sustainability Framework. The qualitative emphasis is particularly interesting in that we often get caught in the production of spider diagrams, and the quantitative computations behind them. This is a good illustration of the fact that a framework is here to organize (systematize) our thinking. When numbers help, let's use them and organize them in a way which helps our intelligence. But here's a good illustration that qualitative analysis can be deep and meaningful, and that it is certainly not second-rate to good quantitative data;
• I personally really liked the way in which the authors used the definition of sustainability to structure some of their discussion. They also explicitly present the need for adaptation of the model for this specific study in the methodology.

Finally-- and this may betray my own bias as much as the authors' intent--the study findings are used to develop recommendations, which I see as scenarios (from a complex systems' methodological perspective) for sustaining CBO efforts for HIV in rural areas. [Some of our ICF colleagues in Atlanta have been doing work on this same issue with NACA and the Bank in Nigeria.]

Click here to access the provisional PDF of this paper. You can also find it in our Resources' page, with the authorization of the authors.

Have a great 2013!


Eric