Completing the 'Our Chances with HIV II' project was a great experience of the challenges of Project management. We faced challenges ranging from the respect of timeliness, maintaining HIV confidentiality rules and working with partners.

Let me share one experience with you here. When GYCA announce our award in late January,it was good news because our project was planned for January to June 2010. However, things were not that smooth when we realized GYCA could not provide the funds until mid February. Waiting till the funds were available meant we will miss important date on our Plan of action especially the National Youth Week which runs from February 1 - 10.

We therefore had to look for alternatives means of funding. There was no liquid money in our account so we had to go for a micro-finance loan.

The risk with taking a micro finance to pre-finance a project is paying the interest on loan when it was not budgeted in the plan of action. We were lucky that the late transfer of funds coincided with a risen currency exchange rate. the surplus from the currency exchange was thus used to pay the interest on the micro finance loan.

What if the exchange rate didn't work in our favor? It is therefore advisable that project managers should always keep in mind that they might need a supplementary source of funds to pre-finance activities in the case of eventual delay in funding.

Dear GYCA members,

Greetings from the beautiful land of Nepal. This is my fourth blog post wherein I want to share with you the adjustments made for the success of my project “Promoting awareness and empowerment in Nepalese adolescents on HIV and AIDS and drug use".

I had heard somewhere that turning every challenge into an opportunity is the true prerequisite for success and with great pleasure, I can say that my project has done that.

Here is a brief account of the adjustments we made to make the project a success and more valuable to the community

1.Location
The plan originally was to carry out awareness raising sessions in schools. However, the project period clashed with that of the session-end break in the entire country. So, for the initial 4 sessions, a local community hall was arranged and project activities were conducted therein. The last 2 sessions, however, were conducted in schools.

2.Postponing sessions to be carried out of Kathmandu
Even though we had problem carrying out session in schools in Kathmandu, we wanted to do so in Kaski district which is why we postponed the project to the third week of April, when the schools reopen for new session.

3.Coverage and diversity
The session break turned to be a ‘blessing in disguise’ for us as the number of students attending the project activities dramatically increased and so did the number of schools they represented. So, the coverage of project activities increased.

4.Reprinting of IEC materials
The number of participants increased by such proportion that we had a very limited number of IEC materials left for the last session. However, the school liked the concept so much that they agreed to support us by providing us photocopies of the pamphlets free of cost which we could distribute to the students.

5.Reach to parents and teachers
The school also asked permission from the team to include the IEC materials in their library and distribute the photocopies to the parents and teachers. Thinking about the huge group of population who could benefit for the information, we agreed to their offer.

I hope my experience will be useful in planning and implementing your own novel projects in future...

Until next time, bye from Vinita!