The Central Asian Region faces one of the world’s fastest HIV epidemics mainly due to injecting drug use. This situation dictates an urgent need for scaling up access to prevention programs for injecting drug users throughout the region. Recent researches show that coverage of current prevention programs reach less than 10% of the estimated 500.000 drug users. Different stakeholders promote coverage of 60% or higher of IDUs to reverse the tide of epidemic. This can be possible provided appropriate resources including professionals with sufficient knowledge and skills are in place. CARHAP sees its role in assisting Central Asian governments to strengthen and sustain the capacities of existing resources and meanwhile aims to initiate new harm reduction programs and breed new professionals. This paper is aimed to provide a framework for CARHAP’s capacity building assistance.

Capacity Building: Goals, Approaches and Methods

Despite the fact that the focus of many development organizations has recently been shifted from direct service support and/or expansion to provision of capacity building assistance to service providers there is still no single agreed definition for capacity building.

As a working definition we have adopted the following description for capacity building proposed by Brown et al.: Capacity building (CB) is a process that improves the ability of a person, group, organization, or system to meet its objectives or to perform better. Therefore CARHAP capacity building interventions will focus its efforts not only on building knowledge and skills of staff providing HIV/AIDS services (improvement in ability to perform work functions), but also on improving the processes that go on within the health system as a whole (improvement in function); the organizations within the health system (improvement in function); and individuals (improvement in ability to engage productively with the health system through access to services and influencing resource management, and improving their own health). Capacity building assistance will include interventions aimed to strengthen service delivery systems, spectrum of services, management systems, strategies, networks and supporting the development of national policy.

CARHAP will target mainly three groups for capacity building support, these are: (1) national pools of consultants; (2) organizations providing harm reduction services (HRSO) and (3) governmental institutions.