Despite international commitments to achieve universal access to HIV/AIDS services by 2010, including 80% coverage for prevention of parent-to-child transmission services, progress toward these goals remains too slow, and pediatric HIV transmission remains unacceptably high, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Global AIDS Alliance (GAA) and its African-based partners with support from The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) have launched a three-year global networked advocacy Campaign to End Pediatric HIV/AIDS (CEPA).  The overarching goals of the Campaign are to overcome policy and implementation bottlenecks which prevent the scaling up of parent-to-child transmission (PPTCT+) and pediatric diagnosis, treatment, and care programs in six focus countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

CEPA's Core Objectives

The Campaign will focus particularly on the following areas:

1. Family-Centered Care and Nutrition
2. Early Infant Diagnosis and Treatment
3. Access to Appropriate Medications
4. Full Funding to Eliminate Pediatric AIDS

iScale's Partnership with CEPA

A complex and dynamic local to global networked advocacy campaign such as CEPA requires a continuous monitoring and learning system that includes:

1. real time and rapid advocacy action learning and sharing for identifying and overcoming policy and implementation bottlenecks,
2. advocacy action plans based on well elaborated theories of action at the country and global levels with aligned key performance indicators (KPIs) that are reportable and useable by multiple stakeholders including funders,
3. reporting instruments (such as scorecards) that include KPIs, constituency feedback data, and lessons learned to incentivize and support adaptive action including transmitting effective practices across at least seven national loci of action,
4. a 21st century communications platform that supports real-time virtual engagement across network partners, generates a dynamic knowledge base of effective practices, and further supports the advocacy efforts of the network partners,
5. data, information, and analysis demonstrating the degree and level of achievement of outcomes and the plausible contribution thereof from CEPA.

iScale’s Impacts Planning, Assessment, Reporting, and Learning (IPARL) system cohesively ties together a range of activities including: advocacy planning, data gathering and monitoring, data analysis and evaluation, action learning, and reporting. It serves as an internal and external communications and accountability mechanism across a range of stakeholders, a basis for strategic planning, and can inform future programs and investments.

An IPARL system that matches CEPA’s specific needs will include the following components:

1. Clearly articulated and elaborated overall theory of change for CEPA
2. Clearly articulated global and country level theories of action for CEPA partners
3. An integrated assessment framework (aligned with the theory of change and theories of action) composed of:
   1. A set of baseline data at the Global and Country levels
   2. A set of Global and County level KPIs and score cards 
   3. Data collection and monitoring procedures and capacity building 
   4. Periodic evaluation – including impact evaluation
4. Public and donor reporting
5. Learning and improvement processes and activities
6. Constituency Voice and Feedback
7. A CEPA network communications platform supporting the IPARL system

Learn more about the Campaign at its website.