Eastern Caribbean Community Access Project: Increasing Access to HIV/AIDS Services through Evidence-Based Programming

In collaboration with the Caribbean HIV/AIDS Alliance and Intrahealth, CAPS is working in four Eastern Caribbean countries to enhance the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The USAID-funded Eastern Caribbean Community Action Project (EC-CAP) supports prevention, development and use of strategic information, roll-out of community-based counseling and testing, and provision of care services (palliative and home based care). As one of three partners, the CAPS team’s specific aims are:

1. To identify the barriers and facilitators to access and delivery of HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services (Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, St. Vincent-Grenadines)
2. To assess the feasibility and acceptability of prevention interventions for different population groups at risk for HIV (St Kitts-Nevis, Barbados)
3. To provide technical support and capacity building to improve regional, country and programmatic monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems for assessing the quality and impact of HIV services (all countries)

CAPS is providing specific expertise and technical support to design a series of special studies to:

• Describe HIV risk and health seeking behavior
• Conduct studies on implementation and scale-up community-based HIV counseling and testing
• Train local prevention providers on monitoring and evaluation systems, data use and program planning
• Provide local organizations with technical assistance in strategic information, package findings and recommendations of the evaluations into best practice publications
• Disseminate the publications at the international, regional, and national level