Internship Report
University of the Western Cape HIV/AIDS Programme
Name Loes Kreijtz
Student Number 2103958
Home University University of Groningen
Host University University of Uppsala
NOHA Internship Coordinator Elena Herman
Internship Organisation University of the Western Cape HIV/AIDS Programme
Supervisor Providing Organisation Joachim Jacobs
Address Room 11, Education building
Table of contents
Introduction ... 3
1. The Internship Organisation ... 4
2. Tasks & Activities of the Internship ... 5
2.1. Research tasks ... 5
2.2. Programme tasks ... 7
3. Supervision of the Internship ... 9
4. Living Conditions ... 10
5. Conclusion ... 11
5.1 Learning effects ... 11
5.2 Expectations ... 11
5.3 SWOT-analyses ... 12
5.4 The internship as part of the NOHA programme ... 13
Introduction
I did not quite know what to expect before starting the internship. I had gained information about the programme´s work on their website and social media channels before starting the internship, which gave me a broad overview of their activities. During my internship at the Embassy of The Netherlands in Mozambique, I only gained experience on HIV/AIDS programmes on a very large scale and from a donor perspective. This was usually quite abstract, as we were not the implementing party of the programmes and in involved a lot of meetings with and reporting from implementing parties and the Mozambican Ministry of Health. I was excited to do an internship on the implementing side as well, to gain more experience on programme design and implementation. Also, the fact that this programme works on a relatively small scale appealed to me, since this makes the work more concrete and I was looking forward to gaining some experience in the field.
1. The Internship Organisation
The University of the Western Cape´s HIV/AIDS Programme was established in 2001initally to recognize the significant impact of the HIV epidemic on UWC´s students and staff. In addition to this, the programme acquired a role in community outreach in later years, by designing and implementing programme and interventions for the less-privileged neighbourhoods surrounding the UWC campus. Since 2001, the HIV/AIDS Programme has developed an integrated model to respond to the epidemic that incorporates teaching, research, care and support, community outreach, advocacy, prevention and management of the epidemic. The programme had a range of different activities, which can be divided in five main categories: Prevention Services, Support Groups, Counselling and Testing, Community Outreach and Curative Services.
where many students can get tested and receive counselling at the same time. The main aim of these events is to encourage all staff and students to know their status. Curative services are also offered in cooperation with the campus Health Clinic and are primarily detect and treat other sexually transmitted diseases, TB and other opportunistic infections. Community Outreach activities include interventions and programmes mostly aimed at vulnerable youngsters living in less-privileged neighbourhoods surrounding the UWC campus.
The HIV/AIDS Programme makes use of a peer education system, where a group of around 25 students is recruited annually to assist with the programmes and interventions. These students play a significant role in educating their fellow students, raise topics of discussions among students and promote the events and activities of the programme.
Besides HIV, the programme is also engaged in raising awareness of, researching on and dealing with other themes present on campus. These themes mainly include LGTBQ related stigma and rights, sexual and gender-based violence and motivating students to work on their future dreams in terms of career and personal life. This last theme is mainly reflected at the projects the HIV/AIDS programmes runs aimed for school dropouts in the neighbourhoods surrounding the UWC campus.
2. Tasks & Activities of the Internship
As mentioned in the introduction, my internship was split up into two parts; the research including the field study and the programme tasks. During the first meeting we discussed how these two parts would be divided over the week. We decided that I would be in the office on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday where I would mainly be working on programme tasks, except if we had session for the field study planned. On Thursdays and Fridays I would work from home or the library, mainly on the research. In practice this distinction turned out not to be that strict; some Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I worked on my research in the office, while some Thursdays and Fridays I came back to the office for specific interventions or other activities.
2.1. Research tasks
could be arranged. I had to make sure I collected all my research data before the end of the internship, so it was essential to start working on that soon. Secondly, students in South Africa had holidays in July and only went back to school or university at the beginning of august. Tis meant that there were not that many interventions and activities going on at that time, since most of the interventions and activities are organised on campus or at schools.
When I first came to Cape Town I had no idea yet which specific intervention I would do research on. During my first week in the office, a meeting was organised between me, my internship supervisor and my research supervisor. At this meeting we came up with two research ideas, including two specific interventions. As one of those ideas suited my internship better, I decided to go for that intervention.
The intervention I choose for my research entails season 4 of the series MTV Shuga. This television series is developed as part of MTV Staying Alive in partnership with, USAID, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Elton John AIDS Foundation and the South African Department of Basic Education. The series are recorded in different African Countries and first broadcasted in 2009. The last season of the series is recorded in South Africa, however we choose not to use this season as the topics of season 4 suited the research purpose better. The series is made mainly for teenagers and addresses a broad range of different social issues. Season 4 specifically covers HIV-stigma, HIV-testing, disclosure of HIV status, mother to child transmission, effect of antiretroviral therapy, relationships with HIV, teenage pregnancies, sexual violence, sexual education and first-time sex. The series is often used as an intervention in schools in South Africa to raise awareness on these topics and to educate students about these topics. Besides the series, education material has been developed to used complementary to the series, to enhance the educational aspect of the series.
the second survey, however we selected ten people to have a focus group discussion with at each session. A month after the session the participants would receive an email with a third survey to measure sustained impact.
My internship had a big facilitating role in these session as the venues were arranged by the programme and the participants were recruited from the programme´s network. The programme also provided the participants with lunch, drinks and snacks during the sessions. Furthermore, my internship supervisor supervised the research design, the survey design and the consent forms. Two of the programme officers were involved in the setup of the focus group discussions and in developing the questions for discussion as they had a lot of experience with focus group discussion concerning HIV-related themes.
I managed to collect all the data during my internship period, which was the aim the beginning. The data was also processed during my internship period, but I am currently still in the process of writing down the research findings, which will be shared with the programme once finished.
2.2. Programme tasks
As stated above, the first weeks of my internship the focus was more on the research tasks, but this does not mean that there were no programme tasks involved. The month of August was women´s month in South Africa and the HIV/AIDS programme organised a lot of activities during this month. A specific women´s week was organised in which activities for women were organised every day. These activities varied from discussions, to health-care promotion and awareness campaigns. I the month of July assisted in developing these activities. When the students were on holiday, most of my colleagues at the programme were busy with finishing up the activities from the past semester, which mainly involved report writing. I assisted with writing the reports of some of the past activities.
violence and their previous course work these topics. The aim of the study was to find gaps in students’ knowledge, abilities, readiness and skills regarding topics related to sexual and gender-based violence for a better inclusion of these topics in the curriculum.
After the holidays of the students ended, many more interventions and activities took place at the programme. I started off with assisting with interventions on community outreach. The first intervention was in one of the less privileged areas around the UWC campus, called Manenberg. I travelled there with one of my colleagues from the unit and one of the peer educators. This was my first time working with the peer educators as well. The intervention took place in a community centre and it was aimed at primary school children. The aim of the intervention was to raise more awareness around HIV and to educate the children about HIV. I found this intervention quite challenging to participate in. The children were quite young and sex is an unavoidable topic while talking about HIV. However, the focus of this intervention was more on what HIV exactly is and to make children aware that the virus is around even when you cannot see it. Stigma-reduction was also an important part of the intervention, as another aim was to make children aware that people living with HIV are not necessarily very ill and can live their life in the same way as people who are HIV negative.
Lastly, I support with the set-up and implementation of HIV testing events/test drives. During the period of my internship, the programme organised two large scale HIV test drives. The first one was a test drive for all student of UWC and lasted four days. It was a big event where were not only tested on HIV, but also received sexual health education. Over 1000 students were tested during this test drive, with over 400 students already on the first day. My tasks were mainly assisting with the planning and logistics. The second test drive was also on campus, but this was a male only test drive. During the regular test drives, many students who are getting tested are female. Therefore, the programme organised a male only test drive to reach this target group as well. During this test drive I was involved in planning and recruitment of male students for the testing.
3. Supervision of the Internship
As mentioned before, I had a research and a programme supervisor during this internship. In practice, they were overlapping. My programme supervisor is involved in a lot of research conducted in cooperation with the HIV/AIDS programme and is a very experienced academic researcher as he obtained a doctorate as well. He ended up supervising me a lot on my research design and the development of the stigma scale I used for my research. He covers a lot of roles within the HIV/AIDS Programme and is very busy. Therefore, it turned out that there was not much time left for him to supervise my tasks regarding programme design and implementation. In practice, the two programme officers working for the HIV/AIDS programme provided me with the most guidance and supervision on the programme part of my internship. I had three main meeting with my internship supervisor during my internship period. The first meeting was at my first day in the office. During this meeting we addressed mutual expectations and discussed which tasks could be interesting for me. We also discussed the goal of the internship during this meeting. We both concluded that the main aim of the internship would be for me to acquire an as broad as possible overview about the different activities of the programme and the different fields the programme works in. The second objective was for me to acquire some actual field experience, by assisting in the interventions at campus and local communities.
the research was going well, I was already making satisfactory progress with the data collection. The other tasks I had been conducting also went well. We did decide that I could work more on personal development. So far, I had been performing tasks which were very much in my comfort zone, as I had already experience with those tasks. Those tasks were mainly reporting and assisting in programme design. On programme implementation I was always working together with other colleagues, which made that I was very comfortable in performing those tasks. For these reason, we decided that I would get the opportunity to design and implement an intervention by myself. The full responsibility for this intervention would be in my hands, from beginning to end. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, this intervention was cancelled last moment. Although I already made the design of this intervention, I did not get the chance to implement them.
The last meeting with my supervisor was at my last day in the office to evaluate my internship. This was a very brief meeting, as my supervisor was on sick leave and he only came in to the office for this meeting and we had a goodbye meeting with the whole team after. During this meeting we expressed that we were both very satisfied about the internship.
4. Living Conditions
The internship did not assist me with finding accommodation in Cape Town, however we did receive some advice to find accommodation from our third semester coordinator. She advised us to find a room in Cape Town city centre, as this is the safest area and most activities to do in your free time are in that area. This was a very good advice, since I always felt really save in this area and Cape Town city centre is very nice and alive. This choice of accommodation did however pose a transportation problem. The UWC campus, where the HIV/AIDS Programme is situated, is quite far away from Cape Town city centre. As public transport is very unsafe in Cape Town, I ended up taking an Uber to campus every day. Although I did make a deal with one specific driver, this cost me a lot of money. As the internship was unpaid and rent is quite expensive in Cape Town, it was hard to live in Cape Town financially.
5. Conclusion
5.1 Learning effects
My internship at the HIV/AIDS Programme had very strong learning effects on both social skills, skills relating to programme design and implementation and research skills. During this internship I learned to interact on different social levels. Especially the contact with the peer educators of the programme and the participants of the interventions was new to me. One of my role during the interventions and the data collection sessions was to coordinate and supervise the peer educators who assisted with the interventions. This role as a coordinator was new to me and it required strong communication skills. The peer educators were working for the HIV/AIDS programme voluntarily, so it was very important to make them feel appreciated. However, as we needed the interventions to be effective, it also required clear and direct communication. I learned a lot from finding a balance between these two approaches. During the interventions, I also had an educational role towards the participants. This was also new for me and it therefore required confidence to guide a group of students/children/teenagers.
Besides the social aspect, I also acquired more skills in programme design and implementation. This internship gave me a clear overview on the entire process from an idea, to design, to implementation and finally evaluation. I learned to be creative and to manage logistics. I also learned to analyse which aspects of an intervention worked and which need to be adjusted for future interventions.
Lastly, I acquired a lot of knew research skills during this internship. Before starting this internship, I only had experience with literature studies. My research at the HIV/AIDS Programme was a mixed method approach, combining quantitative data acquired via a survey, with qualitative data acquired via focus group discussion. This was quite challenging, as I did not have any experience with survey design, data processing in SPSS and conducting focus group discussions. Luckily, I had a lot of support in this process. My supervisor helped me with the survey design, a PHD student connected to the programme helped me with the data processing in SPSS and my colleagues assisted with the focus group discussions.
5.2 Expectations
started to get my first expectations. My main expectations were that I would become involved in the programmes and activities organised by the programme and that I would be doing some work in the local communities. During the first weeks of my internship, these expectations were not fulfilled yet, since I was not involved in a lot of interventions then. This changed after the students´ holidays and therefore these expectations were fulfilled in the end.
The main difficulties I encountered during the internship were related to planning and communication. Sometimes I felt it was very hard to plan something with colleagues. We could have made an agreement to do an activity or meeting at a certain day and then it would be happening on the day itself. On other days, someone could all of a sudden decide that there should be an activity the next day. Then there was not much time left to prepare. These planning and communication difficulties required a lot of flexibility from my side, this is definitely something I have learned during this internship as well.
5.3 SWOT-analyses
Strengths
• Really dedicated staff • Close relationship with local
communities and the student community on campus • Peer education system
Weaknesses
• Small team with high work load • Communication within the team not
always clear • Limited funding
• Peer educators not always dedicated
Opportunities
• Seeking new, external funding opportunities
• Organising regular meeting with the whole team to improve communication and planning • Offer the peer educators benefits to
keep them motivated, like free lunch or a certificate
Threats
• Shrinking of the team will lead to an even higher workload, which can affect the supervision of future interns as well
• Not enough peer educators to organise all activities, especially during exam periods
5.4 The internship as part of the NOHA programme
Working in the public health sector in Cape Town cannot be considered as humanitarian work but more as development work. However, this does not mean that the internship was not relevant as a contribution for the NOHA programme. During the internship I acquired a broad range of knowledge and skills, which can be very beneficial for working in the humanitarian sector. In emergency settings, there is a greater risk of the spread of HIV and people living with HIV have special needs. The knowledge I acquired on the spread of HIV, HIV protection and HIV treatment is very applicable in humanitarian settings as well. Furthermore, skills like programme design, implementation and reporting are very valuable for working in humanitarian programmes.
5.5 Positioning of the job market
