Former FHI/Ghana Country Director Fatimata Sy Receives Award for Excellence

JANUARY 2009 — "Women of Africa are great: we are strong; we are very bright; we have a can-do spirit... The epidemic among women would have been worse if we had not taken the mantle in our own hands."

These words were spoken by Bernice Heloo, President of the Society for Women Against AIDS in Africa (SWAA), at a ceremony honoring former FHI/Ghana Country Director Fatimata Sy for her work in West and Central Africa. SWAA is a pan-African organization devoted to working with local partners in 40 countries to ease the burden of HIV/AIDS on women and families.

Fatimata Sy received the SWAA Excellence Award Dec. 5 to recognize her work on behalf of women and children affected and infected by HIV and AIDS. SWAA thanked Sy for all the valuable support—technical, resource, and moral—she has provided for SWAA and partner organizations. SWAA held its awards ceremony during the 15th International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA) in Dakar, Senegal.

Sy has worked in HIV/AIDS programs for almost 15 years, nearly half of them with FHI. She has managed and evaluated health programs across West Africa for FHI, USAID, and the World Bank. Most recently, she was FHI/Ghana Country Director as well as Director of the USAID-funded and FHI-led AWARE-HIV/AIDS Project, headquartered in Accra, which worked to improve the response to the epidemic in 20 countries in West and Central Africa.

Sy began working with SWAA more than five years ago, first under the FHI/Senegal Program and during the last five years under AWARE-HIV/AIDS. Sy says women are key because they are a vulnerable population who also take care of the health of their families and extended families, providing excellence guidance as to the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS. Women leaders have been on the rise, says Sy, and she wanted to harness that energy. One of the best ways to do this was to work with local networks of women.

Under Sy's direction, AWARE-HIV/AIDS worked with SWAA International to strengthen its management capacity and its marketing and advocacy programs. SWAA constituencies were revitalized and individual SWAA branches strengthened, enabling the organization to reach more women at local levels, build membership registers, create fundraising proposals, and conduct sensitization campaigns to increase access to HIV/AIDS care and treatment for women and children.

Involving women in prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV programs—in service delivery, program promotion, and peer education—and improving women's knowledge of this vital service was an area of great interest to Sy and AWARE-HIV/AIDS.

When asked about Sy's work, Bernice Heloo said, "We love Fatimata; we are very proud to be able to give her this award for her work." As Heloo wrote in her nomination letter, Sy's efforts "will certainly benefit many generations."

Sy's expressed surprise and pride on receiving the excellence award: "I am proud and honored as a woman working with women. I am honored to be appreciated by my peers." She added that she does the work because she is dedicated to it, not for recognition, but she feels motivated and reenergized by the award.

Sy thanked FHI for the opportunity to do this work and shared the recognition with her colleagues of the past five years, including the whole FHI team and all those who participated in AWARE-HIV/AIDS. In thanking her, she believes that SWAA is showing appreciation of FHI's work throughout West Africa.

— Claire-Helene Mershon

PHOTOS: (Top) Fatimata Sy, former Country Director of FHI/Ghana, received an award for excellence from SWAA International. (Center) One of many posters in the youth tent at the ICASA Conference. (Bottom) Fatimata Sy (left) and Bernice Heloo, President of SWAA International. (Claire-Helene Mershon/FHI)