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.