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Food For Assets: Adapting Programming to an HIV/AIDS Context
Consortium for the Southern Africa Food Security Emergency (C-SAFE)
September 16, 2004

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C-SAFE has deliberately disseminated this document as a 'draft' to provide an opportunity for consortium members and other stakeholders to review and provide feedback on the content before the document is finalized.

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Introduction

Background on C-SAFE
The Consortium for Southern Africa Food Security Emergency (C-SAFE) is in its second year of implementation of a coordinated developmental relief program in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Consortium implements relief and recovery programs to 1) improve nutritional status, 2) protect productive assets, and 3) strengthen household and community resilience to current and future shocks that affect their food security and livelihoods. The consortium consists of three core NGO members, (CARE, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and World Vision (WV)) with CARE serving as C-SAFE lead agency in Malawi, CRS in Zambia and World Vision in Zimbabwe. The Malawi Consortium has six additional members: AFRICARE, Emmanuel International (EI), Malawi Red Cross Society, Salvation Army, Save the Children UK, and Save the Children US. ADRA joined C-SAFE Zambia consortium in Year 2. The regional C-SAFE program unit (RPU) is located in Johannesburg, South Africa.

C-SAFE's program was designed with the understanding that the severity of the 2002 food security emergency reflected the fragility of livelihoods throughout southern Africa and that any strategy seeking to successfully reverse this trend must address both the 'acute' and the underlying 'chronic' food insecurity. C-SAFE was thus founded on a broader and more diversified understanding of livelihood and safety-net recovery, and was intended to complement the ongoing developmental programming that C-SAFE members have undertaken in this region over the last several decades.

Learning Spaces
Given the novel approach of a regional NGO consortium and the application of the "developmental relief" strategy, C-SAFE presents a wealth of opportunities for both reflective practice within the consortium and dissemination of best practices and lessons learned to a broader stakeholder audience. In order to provide a forum for reflective practice and capture learning, C-SAFE developed the Learning Spaces initiative. The initiative engages in learning activities around themes such as working as a consortium, development relief, targeted food programming in the context of HIV/AIDS and adapting Food For Assets to an HIV/AIDS context, and others that have been prioritized by C-SAFE membership.

Objectives of the study
The objective of this study, "Food for Assets: Adapting Programming to an HIV/AIDS Context," is to review a variety of C-SAFE and non-C-SAFE Food for Assets (FFA) projects with the aim of identifying better practices in FFA programming. This review has a specific focus on HIV/AIDS as a cross cutting issue, and therefore considers HIV/AIDS in the design and targeting aspects of FFA interventions. The research involved in this study has enabled C-SAFE to develop a series of guiding questions that may be applied to all FFA interventions with the goal of providing practical guidance to HIV/AIDS mainstreaming for FFA interventions. More specifically, this guidance is intended to remind us to involve PLHA and households affected by HIV/AIDS in the planning, creation/development, and management of assets for FFA programming, as well as to examine the various ways that projects can be designed to specifically mitigate against the various impacts of HIV/AIDS on households and communities.

Methodology
The study was predominantly qualitative with the aim of capturing the social and institutional context related to FFA planning and implementation in context of HIV/AIDS. Field visits were conducted in Zimbabwe and Malawi, where consultations were held with program staff and semi-structured interviews were conducted with FFA participants in Malawi (Thyolo, Phalombe, Machinga and Lilongwe) and Zimbabwe (Gutu, Gwanda and Beitbridge). Interviewees included households affected by chronic illness; households with orphans; FFA project committee members; and community focus groups. Consultations were held with UNAIDS, WFP, FAO and OXFAM in Malawi as well as phone interviews with a number of agencies in East and Southern Africa (Annex 2).

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