Implementing Comprehensive HIV/STI Programmes with Sex Workers Implementing Comprehensive HIV/STI Programmes with | Page 84

3 Community-led Services

Programme monitoring: With experience and support, community outreach workers can participate
in monitoring the programme and improving its quality. This develops naturally from the approach
taken with micro-planning, where community outreach workers assume responsibility for recording,
analysing and acting on data about the sex workers to whom they provide services.
Monitoring should not require literacy, and community outreach workers who collect monitoring
data should also be provided with tools to analyse them (as with micro-planning) and the authority
to act on the analysis. They should also be supported in monitoring aspects of the intervention that
the community considers important but which the implementing organization may not monitor for
its own purposes, such as trends in the service quality of referral clinics.
Programme management and leadership: Community outreach workers can train and mentor
other community outreach workers, and may assume other roles in a programme. As programmes
mature, community outreach workers naturally seek advancement as leaders, and jobs once done
by implementing organization staff may be done by sex workers who began as community outreach
workers. Outreach supervisors/managers may be former sex workers who generally work as full-time
staff with a salary commensurate with that of NGO staff in similar positions.
The non-sex worker staff of implementing organizations may have to adjust their roles and
expectations when sex workers, whom they may have thought of solely as programme beneficiaries,
become their professional peers—and possibly even their supervisors/managers (see Chapter 1,
Section 1.2.1 and Chapter 6, Section 6.2.8). Managing such a change requires a commitment from
the leadership of the implementing organization. It should be seen as a positive development that
helps to sustain HIV prevention in the long term.

3.3 Safe spaces (drop-in centres)
Safe space
(drop-in centre)

• A place for sex workers to relax, socialize and hold group activities
• Main venue for interaction between the community and the programme
• Place to help sex workers strengthen social bonds and form a sense of
community
• Platform for community mobilization, training and organizing initiatives

From the outset of a programme, “safe spaces” (also known as drop-in centres) should be established
to bring community members together. Safe spaces are rooms rented by the programme and
furnished simply that provide community members with a comfortable place to relax, rest, get
information and interact with each other and with the programme. Safe spaces are multi-functional;
they may also serve as:
• a place where community members may discuss programmes with programme managers to
improve services
• a venue for psychosocial services and support, based on community demand
• a place to provide information on events and activities relevant to the community (not just
programme-related information)

62