Central-Asian conference on community-led monitoring in the context of ensuring health systems sustainability

Health Advocacy Coalition together with our country partners Central Asia Association of PLHIV (Kazakhstan), Partnership Network (Kyrgyzstan) and SPIN Plus (Tajikistan) held the first Central-Asian conference on community-led monitoring in the context of ensuring health systems sustainability. The conference took place in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and was organized within the framework of the project Strengthening community engagement and capacity on Community led monitoring (CLM) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia funded by UNAIDS and CDC.

The aim of the conference is to bring together community organizations, country offices of international agencies and government officials to discuss the issues of integration of community-generated data into national monitoring and evaluation systems and to find common ground on approaches of its use and incorporation. Therefore, the event has gathered over 60 participants, who joined both in-person and online, from CSOs, national AIDS and TB Centers as well as other structures under national ministries of health, local deputies, representatives of CDC, UNAIDS, USAID, UNDP, and CCMs representatives.

Participants from different sectors demonstrated openness to cooperation and shared common understanding of importance of community-led data and its use as a basis to inform decision-making while developing or improving healthcare programs and acknowledged communities’ important role in monitoring of services and other health-related issues. Notably, representatives of governmental structures not only communicated their readiness to consider community-generated data, but also already showed examples of its use and recognition in their work. Yet, there is still a lot to do to make sure that CLM data becomes a comprehensive system of evidence-based information that can exist in parallel to state monitoring and evaluation systems.

The results of the conference are reflected in the resolution below, and also sent to the participants for their approval.

Considering CLM a highly important tool to strengthen communities advocacy capacity in improving healthcare systems and ensuring sustainability of these systems, we are grateful to UNAIDS and CDC for their support of this area of community activities and hope for fruitful cooperation with all key-partners in this direction.