CapacityPlus Presents Top Innovation at HIV/AIDS Meeting

The USAID Office of HIV/AIDS (OHA) Partners Planning Committee selected CapacityPlus’s “Rapid Design of Evidence Based Retention Packages” as the number one abstract for OHA’s recent semiannual partner meeting. In preparation for the innovation-themed meeting, the 22 OHA implementing partners submitted over 50 abstracts describing their most innovative approaches.

This recognition awarded CapacityPlus one of two slots to make a plenary presentation to an audience of more than 150 participants.

CapacityPlus’s Wanda Jaskiewicz presented on the project’s work to develop a rapid, user-friendly tool based on the discrete choice experiment (DCE). The tool is designed to assist human resources managers to assess health worker preferences and determine the most appropriate strategies to motivate health workers to serve in rural and underserved areas.

Participants learned about the many innovative approaches to HIV/AIDS programming from the other OHA partners through interactive roundtable presentations and discussions. Held in October, the meeting’s agenda also included defining innovation and its importance to OHA, sharing innovative ideas among partners, and generating ideas on how to create a supportive environment for innovation to occur.

OHA Director Robert Clay chaired the meeting, and Ambassador Eric Goosby, US Global AIDS coordinator, provided an update on PEPFAR and the vision for the future during his keynote address.

Photo by Laura Wurts. (Health workers and patients in the obstetrics ward of Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital in western Uganda—one of the field testing sites for the DCE-based tool)