What works when building a children's therapy programme in the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis? An emic perspective of resilience

A fundamental critique of many programmes implemented to support children in Africa is that they are typically formulated elsewhere, and local communities are only consulted in superficial ways. Drawing on an emic perspective of resilience, this paper presents a detailed case example of the organic design and delivery of a resilience-building programme created bottom up, in a low-resource, middle-income African country. The Balekane EARTH programme was designed in 2001 in response to the consequence of Botswana’s HIV epidemic that resulted in tens of thousands of orphaned children. Genuine needs assessment by the community and co-creating programmes with them has been fundamental to the sustainability of the programme. Our case example shows that the programme followed Ungar’s seven phases of resilience programme design and delivery: programme identification, outlining, resource gathering, links to other services, piloting, adaptations to context, tracking success, and planning sustainability. Keywords: emic perspective, resilience, orphans, kinship, Botswana, networks.