Implementing Comprehensive HIV/STI Programmes with Sex Workers Implementing Comprehensive HIV/STI Programmes with | Page 83

3 Community-led Services

Box 3.7

Case example: Using technology in sex worker networks
Some sex worker organizations use mobile phones or the Internet to enable community members to seek
and offer support among themselves.
In South Africa, a sex worker community-based organization operates a helpline to disseminate information.
Calls to the helpline from a landline phone are free, and mobile phone users can send an SMS text message
to receive a call back so that they do not have to pay for a call from their mobile phone. The helpline offers
an SMS alert service that sends information to community members who have enrolled for the service. A
sex worker can report bad clients (e.g. for non-payment or assault) to the helpline, which will transmit this
information via the SMS network.
The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC), an organization of sex workers, operates a closed Facebook
page that functions like a blog and has a message board for sex workers to post questions, provide support
to one another and provide information about services for sex workers.4
The Ukrainian sex worker-led organization LEGALIFE runs a website5 on which members may post questions
about their rights and about LEGALIFE’s activities. Responses are written by a local human-rights expert
and a consultant on practical psychology affiliated with LEGALIFE. The webpage also features a blog and
a forum section for its members, and local and international news. It is managed by a group of sex workers
with previous experience in managing web content or who have been trained to do so.

D. Foster leadership opportunities for community outreach workers
Experienced community outreach workers improve the effectiveness of outreach and provide
leadership in their community beyond programme services. It is important that programmes adopt
an approach from the beginning that allows community outreach workers to grow as leaders.
Programmes do this not only by showing respect and appreciation to community outreach workers,
but by:
• providing support through training, mentoring, constructive feedback and remuneration
• offering opportunities for them to learn new skills and apply their experience in expanded ways
through the programme and in their communities, so that they and other sex workers are
empowered.
Training and mentoring of community outreach workers should focus not only on outreach, but
also on strengthening their leadership more generally (see also Chapter 1, Section 1.2.6). Community
outreach workers with leadership skills are more likely to use critical thinking and take the initiative
to reach greater numbers of sex workers. They may also support the programme in other important
ways:
Advocacy: Confident community outreach workers may be able to advocate with the police and
sex-work establishment owners to improve interactions with sex workers. Sex workers can be the
strongest advocates with establishment owners for correct and consistent condom use and other
safer sex practices. Community outreach workers may initially need support in this role from non-sex
worker staff of the implementing organization, but staff should be sensitive to the need to reinforce
the community outreach worker as a leader for their community, only stepping in when needed.
4 NZPC also has a public Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Zealand-Prostitutes-CollectiveNZPC-CHCH/194413363949972.
5 http://legalife.com.ua.

61