Regional Outreach Addressing AIDS through Development Strategies (ROADS)

To ensure programme sustainability, local community organisations lead efforts to map community needs and design project activities, which include provision of home-based care for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA), outreach to vulnerable children, peer-based family planning, health education, and referrals. In addition, entrepreneurs and business leaders contribute to initiatives aimed at economically strengthening ROADS II communities.

The ROADS II programme includes the following:

• SafeTStop recreation and resource centres offer educational outreach, confidential voluntary HIV counselling and testing (VCT), and a secure place to relax for truck drivers and other transient workers.
• LifeWorks, an initiative involving regional and local businesses, creates jobs for vulnerable women, older orphans, and care providers as an HIV prevention and care strategy.
• The programme has increased VCT service uptake.
• Through advocacy, regional government policies have been introduced to address critical issues of alcohol abuse and gender-based violence in the context of HIV/AIDS and reproductive health.
• Community-led task forces have been established in four corridor towns to address gender-based violence as a barrier to uptake of HIV, family planning, and other health services.
• Private pharmacists and drug shop staff have been trained in palliative care, anti-retroviral drug treatment (ART) counselling and referral, and a number have been trained in family planning.

For example, in Rwanda, ROADS II, through strategic partners, implements: abstinence/being faithful programming; peer educator training; VCT; palliative care; “wrap-around” programming such as alcohol and drug abuse counselling, interventions to address gender-based violence, and job creation as an HIV prevention and care strategy. This includes skills-building in strategic information management, programme and financial management, leadership, conflict resolution, and governance.

HIV and AIDS, Education, Economic Development.

These transportation corridors have large transient populations, high levels of poverty and unemployment, and high infant, child, and maternal mortality. They are also major routes of HIV transmission. In 2011, ROADS II reached approximately 2.2 million people (including 300,000 truck drivers) who live in or regularly travel through 43 "hotspot" corridor towns. More than 1,170 community-based organisations with approximately 90,000 members have been mobilised into 65 community "clusters" based on mutual needs and interests (e.g., low-income women, PLHA, youth, and orphans and vulnerable children).