Our work focuses on teaching local people new skills, building local capacity and ensuring positive and sustainable outcomes that will benefit future generations.

Our approach to halting the spread of HIV revolves around empowering local communities. Local people create the best solutions to local problems, and Malawians design, implement, monitor and evaluate to administer our programs on the ground. In-country staff use a variety of methods, such as interviews and surveys with home-based care patients, orphans, their guardians, teachers, nurses, doctors, tribal leaders and local women to monitor programs and gather information about our programs' effectiveness.

At the grass roots level, GAIA's programs are implemented by local village women. Village women have a unique perspective on village life-they know how many orphans a family is caring for, whose husband died of HIV, and which girls may be at-risk for the virus and this intimate knowledge is invaluable to us because we are in the business of saving lives. When local people work in partnership with our Malawi Staff to implement critical programs, it improves our efficiency, reduces costs and helps eliminate a community's dependence on aid from international organizations and NGOs. Our work focuses on teaching local people new skills, building local capacity and ensuring positive and sustainable outcomes that will benefit future generations.

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