Our work with communities is guided by four programming pillars: food and income secure, have access to quality health services, access to education and life skills and have ability to reduce their risk and manage disasters. Our fifth pillar underpins the success factors that will make AAH-I an effective and sustainable organisation.
Food and Income Security
We know that when communities have a good supply of food, they will not only have enough to eat, but they will improve their livelihoods by selling the surplus. We also know that communities can thrive by having stable incomes to afford them a dignified life.
AAH-I helps communities improve their farm production capacity through providing them with training, information, inputs and linking them to markets. We provide communities with the know-how, the tools and the resources to build thriving businesses to improve their economic well-being.
Health
Communities are exposed to health challenges that keep them away from having productive lives. Our work focuses on building strong community-level structures together with our partners, to ensure that they respond to the health needs of the most vulnerable particularly women, children and youth.
AAH-I is improving the health of mothers, infants and children, responding to the reproductive and sexual health needs of adolescents and youth, ensuring communities are protected from infectious and communicable diseases, and improving access to safe water, adequate sanitation and hygiene for communities.
Education and Life Skills
Every child and youth has a right to quality education but that right is uncertain in the face of poverty, conflict, cultural barriers and other challenges. Working in both development and humanitarian contexts, we ensure these groups have access to learning opportunities. We tackle the root causes that lead to late enrolment, poor learning outcomes and school drop-out especially among girls.
Africa’s ‘youth bulge’ while a challenge, presents an opportunity to work with a dynamic population to drive development in their economies. AAH-I is working with other partners to craft solutions to transform youth livelihoods by providing them with opportunities through access to entrepreneurial, technical and life skills and other resources.
Disaster Risk Reduction and Management
Disasters, whether natural or man-made bring losses and damage with grave consequences on communities. AAH-I is working with communities to build their capacity to deal with disasters even before they occur and when they do, to have the ability to secure their livelihoods, survival and dignity. AAH-I has prioritized a holistic approach to disaster risk reduction and management working with communities and other partners on both long-range recovery and resilient actions, as well as short-term live-saving interventions especially in humanitarian contexts.
Effective and Sustainable Organisation
Our fifth pillar underpins the success factors that will make AAH-I an effective and sustainable organisation. Our focus in the next five years will be on strengthening our funding and partner engagement, our internal business processes and our learning agenda.
Cross Cutting Issues
We have four main thematic issues which we identify as critical to how we deliver our work and in helping us realise the desired impact. They are foundational in our approach of inclusive targeting, empowerment, engagement and responsiveness within the contexts we operate.
• Gender equality and equity – gender-sensitive programming
• Conflict sensitivity – ensuring our work is part of providing solutions in the delicate environments we work in and not aggravating conflict
• Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) – taking advantage of the opportunities and innovations in ICT for better programming and delivery
• Good governance, policy and practice influencing