Our Impacts
Out of 141,821 CLM issues identified across facilities, SDPs, and states successfully resolved. This reflects strong follow-up, engagement with service providers, and responsiveness by health systems.
Community data collectors trained and engaged to capture tens of thousands of client perceptions and facility observations monthly so that community feedback becomes the basis for service improvement.
Health facilities and service delivery points (SDPs) now have functional CLM mechanisms in place, enabling routine, community-driven monitoring of HIV, TB, malaria, and integrated health services.
Survivors of gender and human rights violations to justice mechanisms, with 12,312 cases successfully resolved at the state level, demonstrating effective community-to-justice system linkages.
COMMUNITY SYSTEMS STRENGTHENING
Building Strong Communities for Sustainable Health Impact
The Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS in Nigeria (NEPWHAN) implements Community Systems Strengthening (CSS) interventions to empower communities as active leaders in Nigeria’s HIV, TB, and health response.
Through CSS, NEPWHAN strengthens the capacity, coordination, and sustainability of community structures—including support groups, community-based organizations (CBOs), networks, and advocates—so they can effectively deliver services, protect rights, and hold systems accountable.
Our CSS work is implemented in alignment with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria approach and supports long-term community ownership of health and human rights interventions.
Why Community Systems Strengthening Matters?
Strong health outcomes depend on strong community systems. Across Nigeria, communities are often the first point of contact for people living with HIV, key populations, women, young people, and other vulnerable groups. They provide information, peer support, referrals, and trusted spaces—often filling gaps where formal systems cannot reach.
However, without deliberate investment, community structures face challenges such as limited organizational capacity, weak coordination with health and social systems, insufficient resources for advocacy, and exclusion from decision-making processes. These gaps reduce the effectiveness and sustainability of HIV and TB interventions.
Community Systems Strengthening addresses these challenges by empowering communities to lead, sustain, and influence health responses. By building the capacity of community organizations and integrating them into national and sub-national systems, NEPWHAN ensures that health services are more responsive, inclusive, and accountable. Strong community systems not only improve access to care—they protect rights, reduce stigma, and ensure that progress in the HIV response is owned and sustained by the people most affected.
Our Community Systems Strengthening (CSS) Approach
NEPWHAN’s CSS approach is people-centred, rights-based, and community-led, recognizing communities as essential partners in Nigeria’s health response. We focus on strengthening both individual skills and institutional systems to create resilient community structures capable of delivering services, advocating for rights, and holding systems accountable.
Our approach emphasizes community leadership and ownership, ensuring that people living with HIV, key populations, adolescent girls and young women, and other marginalized groups actively shape programmes that affect their lives. We invest in capacity building, mentorship, and organizational development to strengthen governance, management, and sustainability of community organizations.
NEPWHAN also prioritizes integration and collaboration, linking community systems with health facilities, legal and social services, and government institutions. Through this integration, communities serve as trusted entry points into care while contributing data, evidence, and feedback that improve service quality.
By combining community empowerment, systems strengthening, and evidence-based engagement, NEPWHAN’s CSS approach ensures that community systems are not temporary project structures—but enduring pillars of Nigeria’s HIV and TB response.
Capacity Building of Community Structures
NEPWHAN strengthens the foundation of community systems by building the technical, organizational, and leadership capacity of community structures that are central to the HIV and TB response. This includes PLHIV support groups, community-based organizations, key population networks, youth- and women-led groups, and grassroots advocates.
Through structured trainings, mentorship, and ongoing technical support, NEPWHAN equips these groups with skills in governance, financial management, monitoring and evaluation, advocacy, service delivery, gender and human rights, and safeguarding. Strengthened community organizations are better positioned to deliver quality services, manage resources responsibly, engage partners, and sustain interventions beyond donor funding cycles.
Strengthening Community Leadership and Advocacy
Community leadership is at the heart of effective and inclusive health systems. NEPWHAN supports community members to move from participation to influence, ensuring their voices shape policies, programmes, and decisions that affect their lives.
This includes preparing and supporting community representatives to engage meaningfully in coordination platforms such as CCMs, technical working groups, and state-level planning forums. By strengthening advocacy skills and linking community voices with evidence from CLM and program data, NEPWHAN enables communities to advocate for equitable policies, improved service delivery, and accountability at local, state, and national levels.
Integration with Health and Social Systems
NEPWHAN ensures that community systems are not isolated but fully integrated into broader health and social protection systems. Strong referral pathways are established between community structures and health facilities, legal and justice services, psychosocial support providers, and social welfare institutions.
This integration allows individuals to receive holistic, coordinated support—addressing not only clinical needs but also legal, social, and psychosocial barriers. By strengthening these linkages, NEPWHAN helps communities serve as trusted entry points into the health system while ensuring continuity of care and protection for vulnerable populations.
Community-Led Monitoring and Accountability
A core element of CSS is empowering communities to monitor, assess, and improve the services they rely on. NEPWHAN supports communities to implement Community-Led Monitoring (CLM) as a structured mechanism for accountability and quality improvement.
Communities are trained to collect and analyze service delivery data, identify gaps and barriers, document rights violations, and engage service providers and authorities with evidence-based findings. Through CLM, communities shift from being passive recipients of services to active drivers of accountability—ensuring that identified issues lead to corrective actions and measurable improvements in service quality.
Sustainability and Institutional Strengthening
NEPWHAN’s CSS interventions are designed with sustainability at their core. Beyond short-term activities, the programme focuses on strengthening the internal systems, governance structures, and leadership pipelines of community organizations.
This includes supporting peer networks, mentorship systems, succession planning, and resource mobilization strategies. By embedding community systems into national and state HIV and TB responses and fostering long-term partnerships, NEPWHAN ensures that communities remain resilient, adaptive, and capable of sustaining health and human rights gains well beyond the lifespan of individual projects.