In Uganda this month, the World Bank approved the launch of a new US$ 15 million programme to address HIV & AIDS challenges in the Horn of Africa. Whilst in Botswana, researchers from the University of Botswana and the University of Pennsylvania have been granted with funds for a five year project to develop research capacity to investigate issues related to adolescents. These are just a hand-full of HIV related interventions that have been initiated this month across the continent, and interventions such as these will continue to receive new funding, develop new ideas and make much progress in the struggle to overcome the effects of the HIV & AIDS epidemic. While the implementation of such interventions is critical in this fight, one incredibly important aspect in addressing any issue has been too often overlooked. This is the adequate assessment of such interventions, and the write-up and distribution of results.

Researchers who work in intervention assessment need to focus more on distributing their results to those who can use them, and those who can use them need to make a more active effort to learn from past lessons. International conferences are one avenue that is used for the distribution of findings, and this is definitely a positive, but again, there are a number of questions that need to be asked: Are the people who will benefit the most from these lessons able to attend such conferences? Are the lessons actually applied in practice after the conferences? Have the interventions been assessed adequately?

The evaluation of an intervention is essentially a matter of individual perception, and it is therefore imperative in attempts to assess the impact of an intervention to examine not only statistically significant change, but also the experiences of the individuals that took part in the intervention, and their perception of its impact. Often, positive and meaningful change, from a participant’s perspective, which s/he attributes to her/his involvement in an intervention, may not be apparent in statistical measures, and may therefore be ignored by researchers. In the field of HIV & AIDS, qualitative research has made many valuable contributions, and continues to deepen our understanding of the complexity of the epidemic. Due to the sensitivity of many HIV-related issues, the non-intrusive, subtle nature of qualitative research makes it ideal, and can often provide far more enlightening data than a quantitative enquiry. It is however, underutilised.

Intervention assessment should not be viewed as a purely scientific research study, where a variable to induce change is introduced, and the change is then statistically measured. The people who experience the change have valuable information that needs to be collected. These individuals should be viewed as part of the team, in a multi-level approach to assessing an intervention, and building on our understanding of the epidemic. The African attempt to address issues related to HIV & AIDS does not have time to relearn lessons in a perpetually debilitating cycle. The continent needs to stand together, and use the lessons learnt for further development and progress.