BUILD LOCAL ACTIVISM & ENGAGEMENT

South Africa has a National AIDS Council (SANAC), provincial AIDS Councils (PACs or PCAs), District AIDS Councils (DACs), and Ward AIDS Councils.

These AIDS councils give civil society a way to have a say in South Africa’s AIDS response. TAC works at all levels (from ward to national) to ensure that AIDS Councils are functional and responsive to the realities we face in our communities.

TAC is a member of the Community-Led Accountability Working Group (CLAW) that supports communities across the global South to build high impact community-led monitoring systems. CLAW was formally established in 2020, comprising ten members working across 20 countries.

CLAW works side by side people living with HIV and members of key populations to build community-led monitoring systems that reflect the priorities that matter most to communities on the frontlines. Our approach is an alliance centred in solidarity, a shared willingness to learn and take risks together, South-South skill exchange and ongoing, collaborative approaches.

District Campaign Teams bring together branch leaders, staff, and comrades from partner organisations in order to identify challenges in the district and inform a mandate in district accountability.

District Campaign Teams use knowledge from branches, including community-led monitoring data, to highlight performance challenges and to find solutions to those problems in order to inform engagement with district level duty bearers and district accountability structures.

The local activism of our members is the true life-blood of TAC. By organising locally, our members demand accountability and quality healthcare services where the services are actually delivered.

Members are supported with the knowledge, skills, and resources to implement community-led monitoring and local campaigns, and understand the latest in science, treatment literacy, health policies, relevant laws, and the overall state of the HIV and TB response and broader healthcare system. In our 25th year, we remain committed to building stronger and more vocal branches, better able to fight for justice for all. If you are interested in joining, you can find a branch near you here.

Over the past decade, South Africa’s HIV response has come a long way — from the dark days of AIDS denialism under then President Thabo Mbeki, to the establishment of the world’s largest treatment programme. However, this achievement only reflects half of the story. The full picture of South Africa also reveals that more than 2.7 million people living with HIV are still not on lifesaving HIV treatment — either never having known their HIV status, or more worryingly having started on treatment and then stopped. This can be directly linked back to the crisis in our clinics.

Ritshidze was developed and designed in response to this crisis. It gives communities the tools and techniques to monitor the quality of health services provided at clinics — including HIV and TB services, and services for key populations — and escalate challenges to duty bearers in order to advocate for change. Ritshidze is one of the most extensive community-led monitoring systems in the world. This type of community-led monitoring is an indispensable strategy for improving the health services that people living with HIV and key populations receive.

Ritshidze is being led and implemented by TAC together with the National Association of People Living with HIV (NAPWA), Positive Action Campaign, Positive Women’s Network (PWN), and the South African Network of Religious Leaders Living with and affected by HIV/ AIDS (SANERELA+) — in alliance with Health GAP, amfAR, and the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.

Spotlight, formerly called the NSP Review, is a print and online magazine jointly published by TAC and SECTION27 that aims to shine a light on the reality of what is happening in the public healthcare system in South Africa.

It also provides commentary and analysis of the AIDS and TB response in South Africa with a particular focus on the implementation of the National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and STIs. It contains articles written by people from TAC and SECTION27 as well as by a wide variety of outside contributors – including doctors, researchers, policy-makers and journalists. It is edited by a small editorial team that jealously guards its editorial independence.

TAC has five sectors — people living with HIV, womxn, key populations, youth, and men. TAC sectors use community-led monitoring data to inform engagement with duty bearers and activism relevant to the sector.

They ensure that this work is communicated and cascaded to all structures of the organisation. They are visible at all levels — including branch, provincial and national. TAC sends well informed sector leaders to represent us in AIDS Councils with a clear mandate and set of advocacy demands based on community-led monitoring data.

TAC’s flagship treatment literacy programme remains key to our model of highly informed grassroots activism. TAC is committed to teaching the science and treatment of HIV/AIDS, TB, and other diseases to our members and the general public.

This programme educates and empowers ordinary people in South Africa to understand how HIV works in the body, how it can be treated and how its transmission can be prevented. It helps people understand the importance of taking treatment as prescribed. Treatment literacy is fundamental to helping people stay on treatment. Branches are trained and subsequently facilitate trainings at a branch, community, and clinic level. In addition, accurate and informative materials related to adherence and treatment literacy are disseminated through localised social mobilisation campaigns.

Modern ART for South Africa — created by TAC and HIV i-base — is modernising this approach. Through a combination of tools, including a mobile app, Modern ART for South Africa ensures that people living with HIV have access to the latest information about ART and useful tools to help manage HIV treatment and health.