Partnering to Achieve Economic Impact in HIV and AIDS-impacted Communities: A Partnership Toolkit for Microenterprise Development

This toolkit helps microfinance and enterprise development organizations to manage their partnerships with other organizations to provide services to HIV and AIDS-impacted communities. The toolkit helps organizations work through the process of establishing and maintaining a successful alliance allowing each partner to contribute complementary skills, resources, knowledge and experience that combine to better serve their clients and promote economic strengthening. It:

• Provides practical guidelines, tools and tips for organizations intending to form an alliance to serve HIV and AIDS-impacted clients;
• Incorporates tools to help create, maintain and exit partnerships that are organized according to the life cycle of the intended collaboration;
• Identifies partnership stages such as forming the partnership, process of formalization; partnership management and final evaluation;
• Includes nine tools for self-evaluation, management team checklist, partner selection, personnel assessment, guidelines for pre-agreement discussion and monitoring, agreement templates, partnership evaluations, and action plan.

Finally, interacting with HIV and AIDS communities require more holistic programming due to the impact of the pandemic. Further, partnerships may often involve grassroots organizations that have little or no experience working with large NGOs or international donors.