Setting a bold new direction that’s responsive and responsible
Avert’s new strategy focuses on transitioning our flagship products - Be in the KNOW and Boost - to African-led organisations who can best ensure they continue to grow and thrive.
Published on 18 April 2024 | Sarah Hand
Avert is coming to the end of our four-year organisational strategy From knowledge to action, during which we have successfully established two high impact digital products, Boost and Be in the KNOW. Building on our decades of experience in HIV and sexual health communications, these products are reaching millions of health seekers, community health workers and frontline healthcare workers with accessible, tailored, evidence-based content that is improving knowledge, confidence, and self-efficacy, driving increased uptake of available health services, and leading to improved health outcomes.
In a rapidly changing landscape, we want to ensure this success can continue. Civil society organisations working in global health, and specifically in the HIV response, are facing enormous challenges as priorities, funding availability and the wider geopolitical landscape continues to change.
We believe that now is the time to responsibly transition these highly successful co-created brands to new owners who are deeply rooted in African communities and who can effectively continue developing and scaling the products. This approach not only maximises the impact of Avert’s work and secures a long-term legacy for the products, but also fosters true local ownership and leadership.
We know that building and maintaining health literacy requires ongoing funding commitment. Online misinformation and disinformation require ongoing rebuttal; meanwhile evidence-based, user-responsive communication approaches and messaging need continuous updating and refreshing to engage new generations of adolescents.
However, funding for HIV and sexual health literacy interventions continues to be crowded out by biomedical interventions and the growing cost of HIV treatment programmes, as overall funding stagnates.
Looking to the future
Setting a new strategic direction can be an exciting time for an organisation. It captures intention and hopes and makes a clear statement on how the organisation will deliver on its mission with its values at the centre. It is also an opportunity for an organisation to adapt the way it works to reflect changes in the wider context and to be more effective for those it serves.
As we consider what we want to achieve in this next strategic phase of Avert’s long history, we need to do so through a wide lens that considers not only the things we can control but recognises the things we can’t. We can’t control changing donor priorities and a growing complexity of need, but we can be in control of passing on the learning we’ve accumulated through developing quality content, and we can be active participants in the positive developments taking place in our sector to rebalance power, decolonise aid and support authentic localisation.
Building on our success to date means planning a route to securing the sustainability and ongoing growth and development of Boost and Be in the KNOW within the context of these external challenges. We believe the best way to achieve this aim, protect our legacy and be proactive in the localisation agenda is to find new homes for Boost and Be in the KNOW in organisations based in Africa, for whom these products clearly help achieve their strategy, add value, and offer new opportunity.
Through our human-centred design and user engagement approach, Boost and Be in the KNOW already engage people from across sub-Saharan Africa in the development of content and design. We believe that now is the time to responsibly transition these highly successful co-created brands to new owners who are deeply rooted in African communities and who can effectively continue developing and scaling the products. This approach not only maximises the impact of Avert’s work and secures a long-term legacy for the products, but also fosters true local ownership and leadership.
This is a bold and exciting new strategy for Avert, an organisation that was started at the beginning of the HIV epidemic, and for 38 years has stayed focused on ensuring people have access to information they can trust and information that supports informed decisions.
Over the next year, we will continue to provide regular updates as we further develop and implement this strategy. We will also document our journey and the learning we gather along the way, to share across our sector as we know we are not alone as a focused, successful organisation that nevertheless needs to make big decisions in a changing world. We would welcome your thoughts on our new direction and invite you to send your comments to info@avert.org.
Photo credit: Sarah Oughton/Avert