Our Journey
2001
Inception
The African Network for the Care of Children Affected by HIV/AIDS was born in September 2001 out of the realization that the care of children living with and affected by HIV/AIDS at that time were not addressed. At that time, September 2001, there was an international conference in Kampala on the launch of the Global Call to Action for Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV. The documents at that launch contained little on the care of children already living with and affected by HIV.Thus, some of the participants, (clinicians and social scientists), at that conference met and established..Read More
2002
ARVs given to children for the first time
The main initial activities of the network were advocacy and training health workers on the care of children affected by HIV/AIDS. In 2002 a casual encounter in Kampala with a Canadian lawyer from British Columbia Province in Canada, who was touring Uganda for the first time, led the lawyer to donate USD 1,000 to buy anti-retroviral drugs for children living with HIV. This money was used to purchase adult tablets of Triomune (a combination antiretroviral drug now discontinued) and the only ARVs available then, from the Joint Clinical Research Centre in Kampala. The first ever ARVs to be given to..Read More
2004
Handbook of Paediatric AIDS launched
The writing of the Handbook of Paediatric AIDS in Africa by over 30 clinicians and social scientists on the African continent was completed in 2004. The writing workshops were funded by USAID/EA with passionate and enthusiastic support by Mary Pat Kieffer, who was then in USAID/EA. The book was launched in 2005 in Dar es Salaam Tanzania by Jeffrey Ashley, then in-charge of HIV programs at USAID/East Africa. This handbook became a popular resource for training health workers on paediatric HIV/AIDS in Africa. During this period, focus for the network was mainly on strengthening technical capacity for paediatric HIV care..Read More
2007
Going legal
In 2007 ANECCA was legally registered in Uganda as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee and thus embarked on a process of organizational capacity development. Similar registration of ANECCA happened in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Niger and Burkina Faso. In 2007, CRS/AIDSRelief provided support that was used to develop a paediatric and adolescent HIV counseling training package that was used to train service providers in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Swaziland, and Zambia. This training package was later in 2018 improved with funding from the USAID AIDSFree Project into a Handbook on Counseling and Psychosocial Care for Children and Adolescents living with and..Read More
2013
Board of Directors established
In 2013 ANECCA got its first Board of Directors, although previously, since the beginning, there was a Steering Committee that provided strategic oversight, but because of the secretariat’s location in RCQHC, the steering committee’s powers were limited From September 2015 to February 2017, with funding from UNICEF Uganda, ANECCA conducted country-wide assessment of services for adolescents and supported the Ministry of Health to: develop priority actions for accelerating and improving the quality of adolescent services. strengthen monitoring and evaluation of the national adolescent HIV program by conducting bi-annual quantitative data collection on adolescent HIV care and treatment services, develop a..Read More
2021
USAID Local Partner Health Services – Karamoja
In October 2021, ANECCA was awarded a grant from USAID to implement the USAID Local Partner Health Services – Karamoja Uganda for 5 years up to September 2026. The expected key results for this project are: 1) Quality facility-based HIV and TB prevention services provided at scale. 2) Quality, targeted, high yield, facility-based HIV testing, and counseling services provided at scale. 3) All diagnosed people living with HIV and TB are promptly initiated on treatment. 4) All diagnosed people living with HIV and TB on treatment achieve viral suppression. 5) Target districts have the institutional capacity to sustain epidemic control..Read More