The impact of HIV & AIDS reaches all corners of the community, and all aspects of life. So Egmont is not proscriptive about the kind of work we support. Breaking down barriers of stigma and discrimination is just as important as improving nutrition. Preventing new infections as critical as improving livelihoods. Egmont’s approach thus allows for a refreshing diversity in the types and sizes of organisations we support and the content of their work.  

Projects we have supported include:

• Reducing transmission of HIV from mothers to their new-born babies in rural Malawi

• Helping a women’s co-operative in Zambia grow into a strong local organisation running community schools

• Working with smallholder women farmers in Malawi to improve literacy

• Reuniting HIV vulnerable street children in Mozambique with their families

• Supporting AIDS affected families in rural Kenya into income generating activities such as stingless bee-keeping and goat rearing.

Whatever their specific focus, when we visit our project partners we are struck time and again by how grassroots solutions can have such a direct and powerful impact for a relatively small investment - a reality that is regularly confirmed by people at all levels.

Our core priorities in delivering this approach are:

• Focus on children and young people as the most vulnerable to the impact of HIV & AIDS

• Careful selection of partners as well as the people behind them, and rigorous assessment of their projects, with an emphasis on locally driven, grassroots organisations

• Cost-effectiveness and value for money, seeking greatest impact from funds invested

• Flexible, efficient and unbureaucratic operations

• Achieving sustained improvements in nutrition, education, family income as well as better care and treatment

• Portfolio approach to spread risk

• Promoting locally owned and peer-to-peer driven systems of assessing impact and developing best practice

• Providing support and advice on both project and organisation issues