This is a story of how an NGO whose work focusses on HIV prevention education managed to, in the space of nine months, transition from doing face-to-face trainings to purely online, virtual trainings. Not only was this achieved in a cost-effective manner, but also offers a promising exempla to other NGOs who may be struggling with maintaining their vision, mission and operations during this time of the pandemic crisis.

Due to Covid-19 lockdown and social distancing, HETTAS with support from USAID re-worked the entire three Vhutshilo curricula and transformed it into a purely online training. This was achieved by using Edmodo as our Learning Management System (LMS). As far as we know, HETTAS is the first NGO in South Africa to migrate training to an online system.

By early February 2021 we had started training NGOs in different provinces simultaneously. Making use of Microsoft Teams for the synchronous ‘live session’ we took youth facilitators through a full five day training. Armed with Teams and Edmodo on their smart phone, they could follow the training, participate and post to the system. The real benefit behind this online training is that the class remains open to the participants and they are able to ask questions and get support during their implementation.

By 7 May 2021, 292 facilitators and supervisors have been fully trained in all three of the curricula. Because facilitators work in pairs that means that 140 pairs are already implementing to groups of 20 youth at a time which makes for significant expansion reach.