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PROGRAMS AREAS Strategic Objective 1: To empower sex workers through health and rights education, advocate for better treatment of sex workers through stakeholder engagement at ward, sub county, county and National level 

The space occupied by sex workers is plagued by deep seated systematic biases that result in criminalizing sex workers hence increasing violence, stigma, discrimination, rape, assault and murder continue to rise. Since sex workers themselves become easy targets even by law enforcers who are supposed to be protecting them.

This leads to a degrading cycle of negative experiences at the hands of law enforcement officers, violence at the hands of their clients, unconscious self stigmatization due to this negative labeling and a feeling of hopelessness on the part of sex workers. To realize our vision we intend to implement the activities below:

Map the distribution of sex workers with a size estimation and hotspot validation to use the hotspot based approach to reach unreached sex workers.

Strengthen our advocacy strategy at ward, sub county, county, national levels through analysis of rights holders and actors to identify allies, opponents and formulate an engagement plan.

Map out ways that depend on human rights of each situation because human rights are dependent on this.

Resource mobilize expand our community engagement through engaged of new unmet sex workers populations, increase paralegals and peer educator.

Task key program staff with communication roles including social media engagements.

Cascade appropriate messages through standard and audience friendly information, education and communications tools.

Track community level violence cases with recording and support for prosecution

Conduct periodic review of the violence response system stakeholders

Periodically engage key influencers and those who have stood their ground to support and create awareness on sex worker issues

Set up of a referrals register that identified health and human rights stakeholder

HIV-related legal services contribute directly to building an enabling environment for effective HIV programs. Legal services help to ensure access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services. Legal services enable sex workers to claim and enforce their rights to access HIV services and thereby create demand for access to HIV services.

Legal services provide concrete solutions to legal and social problems that create or arise from vulnerability to HIV. Strengthening HIV-related legal services enables sex workers to have access to the justice system for HIV-related problems and to obtain protection and redress. Swopambasadors undertakes legal literecavy awareness and legal aid bclinics to enhance access to justice among sex workers. We partner with legal entities such as Katindi & Company advocates in delivering this to our members. 

Swopambassadors in partnership with other Civil Society Organizations in Kenya participated in the drafting of the Law enforcement training curriculum on key populations. The training document is for use by HIV programmers who wish to work with law enforcement officials to reduce violence against key population (KP) members and improve their access to HIV and justice services.

The curriculum also addresses law enforcement officers’ occupational and personal HIV risks and supports knowledge building in HIV prevention, treatment, and care as part of a law enforcement institution’s internal HIV strategy. It can be used to train law enforcement personnel at any level across a range of specialties. In addition to the training materials, this document contains background information on the importance of working with law enforcement, tips on how to initiate engagement, ideas for training adaptation, and examples from countries where the training has been implemented.

Last Tuesday a massive civil society protest took place in Kenya to force government to act on the alarming ARV and HIV commodities stock outs in the country. A day later the Kenyan government committed to ensuring availability in two weeks’ time. Swopambassadors played a key role in mobilisation sex workers to protest this and closely monitored the follow up of this commitment.

The press statement from the Ministry of Health released committed to avail ARVs and other commodities to immediately stop the bi-weekly dispensing and embrace monthly dispensing instead. According to government, the ARVs available can take people through the coming two weeks.

As Swopambassadors we co-initiated the protest together with multiple civil society organisations including the Network of People living with HIV and AIDS in Kenya (NEPHAK) and AIDS Healthcare Foundation. In addition, an open letter to president Uhuru Kenyatta, endorsed by 22 civil society organizations, was published in the Daily Nation as an appeal to the Head of State to solve the issue.

This strategic plan is a result of deliberate and careful planning on the part of the SWOP Ambassadors board and administration team, with resource mobilisation. This strategic plan development process was divided into: • Preliminary Phase: This entailed close discussion between the consultant and the SWOP Ambassadors team to agree on the timelines and process of engagement agree on the priority stakeholders and process of engagement. • Data collection and planning phase: this entailed discussions with the sex workers, sex worker leaders, and program staffs, to review program activities, document any strength, identify any issues and understand new plans for the next 3 years. is entailed desk review and face to face interviews with program staff and stakeholders. Evaluation of capacity assessment was also conducted at this time to carefully document organizational issues. • Compilation and writing phase: this was an iterative process where the outline of the strategic plan was agreed on and the nal document developed through a cycle of repeated review and incorporation of feedback.