As part of GHD’s Strategies for Scale: Paths to Sustainability research, our team had the opportunity to spend time in the field with Mrs. Vyas, who is Director of Mukta — Pathfinder International’s HIV prevention project that is funded via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Avahan India AIDS Initiative.
Through targeted interventions for female sex workers, men who have sex with men, and other high risk groups throughout Maharashtra, india, the Mukta project provides HIV prevention services that address the clinical, social, and political risk environments in which these vulnerable and often hidden communities live and work.
The program’s innovative tools for community leadership and participation in the large-scale program’s agenda-setting, as well as monitoring and evaluation activities, offer promising lessons for large-scale HIV prevention. “Mukta,” a name chosen by the project’s community members, means “liberated” in the local Marathi dialect in Maharashtra. Please join us for a presentation on:
Community leadership in large scale HIV prevention:
Micro-planning by peer educators for service delivery and monitoring
An experience from Maharashtra, India
Darshana Vyas, MSW, MPH
Project Director
Mukta Project, Pathfinder International
Pune, Maharashtra
Wednesday, May 19th 2010
12:00- 1:30 PM
641 Huntington Avenue, 1st floor
Boston, MA
Lunch will be served
Please email us for more information.
Darshana Vyas is the Project Director for the Mukta/Pathfinder International Project in India, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through their Avahan Project. She is responsible for the overall vision, leadership, implementation, oversight, administration, supervision, and management of the Mukta project. She has worked in the field of HIV for the past 27 years, and has managed programs across Asia, Central Asia and Africa. She has worked in post-conflict countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Chad, Rwanda and DRC. In her last assignment, she worked as Chief of Party to manage USAID’s “Sudan Health Transformation Project,” and assisted the South Sudan government to develop their national HIV prevention and Reproductive & Child Health policies. She worked for 10 years as Director of Health Programs at Counterpart International in Washington, DC, where she was responsible for managing the organization’s HIV/AIDS, Reproductive Health and Maternal & Child Health programs in South East and Central Asia, the Pacific Islands, NIS and Africa. Mrs. Vyas received her Masters in Social Work from Gujarat, and her Masters in International Health from UNC Chapel Hill.
