Namwera AIDS Coordinating Committee (NACC) was born in 1996 out of a community need to address the HIV pandemic that was devastating the Malawian district of Namwera, where the HIV prevalence rate was over 17% at the time. Village leaders and community members came together out of a desire to save lives and strengthen community resilience, focusing on three key areas: home-based care for people living with HIV, care for vulnerable children and youth in HIV-affected families, and behavior change programs to limit the spread of HIV.

In 2004, Firelight began funding NACC to launch its youth vocational training program and a goat pass-on program to boost economic livelihoods for community members. Over the course of its long-term partnership with Firelight, NACC began to focus more and more on education – realizing that even when children were provided with school fees, uniforms, and learning materials to be able to continue primary or secondary education, the schools they were attending were still suffering from low quality. NACC understood that in order to address cross-cutting community issues affecting vulnerable children and community members, it was essential to look at the whole system. Firelight supported NACC along this journey of systems thinking.

NACC developed a comprehensive community scorecard that is used to engage community members, children, parents, teachers, local authorities, and village leaders in order to both identify problems and to work towards solutions. Under Firelight’s girls’ secondary education initiative, NACC used their community scorecard to first identify government standards for quality at secondary schools and then to determine whether local Community Day Secondary Schools were actually meeting these standards. Through this process, NACC was able to document the low pass rates for girls in secondary school, high student-to-teacher ratios, lack of textbooks and learning materials, and long distances that students were walking to school – none of which met government standards.

Then, they brought together all stakeholders – students, parents, school committees, teachers, village leaders, and local authorities to discuss each of these domains from their perspectives. These discussions provided fuel for generative conversations about how each stakeholder group could do their part to improve quality. For example, the lack of teaching and learning materials – including desks and chairs – was identified by all stakeholders as a key issue limiting education quality. Working together with NACC, community members realized that this was an issue they could address even without government intervention. As a result, they mobilized community resources to procure furniture for the local struggling secondary schools. NACC also uses this same process for its child protection and early childhood development programs.

Beginning in only four villages in Namwera, NACC has vastly scaled its programs to hundreds of villages through the good will of community members who have volunteered their time and given their resources to NACC’s programs – and has grown in strength as a result of funding and capacity building from Firelight, who did not shy away from partnering with a small organization with potential to make a big impact on the systems that affect children.

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