Since its inception in 2001, m2m South Africa has delivered our core integrated services across seven of the nine provinces—prevention of mother to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT), reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) and Early Childhood Development (ECD)—while remaining at the forefront of our programme innovation and development.

In 2012, the Mentor Mother Model was adopted as national policy and embedded it into the formal healthcare system. During this time, m2m worked in four provinces to recruit, train, and supervise Mentor Mothers across 500 health facilities, before gradually transitioning the programme to government ownership.

In 2018, m2m South Africa launched the USAID-funded initiative—“Children and Adolescents Are My Priority (CHAMP)”—that utilises m2m’s peer mentor model to ensure that orphans and other vulnerable children and adolescents (OVCA) affected by HIV have access health services, are initiated on treatment, and remain in care, and provides support to caregivers of OVCAs.

Mentor Mothers based at the m2m Innovation Hub in Lwandle, Cape Town, are screening clients for hypertension and diabetes and educating the entire household on how to better manage and prevent Non-Communicable Diseases, thanks to support from Johnson & Johnson. The Innovation Hub is where we test, pilot, and refine new programmes for service delivery and health systems strengthening to be adopted and scaled across the organisation.

In another first, Project AMPLIFY is a new initiative currently being implemented in Khayelitsha and Gugulethu, targeted at men who have sex with men (MSM) who are living with HIV. Thanks to funding from Merck Foundation, nine male Peer Mentors have been employed and trained to ensure that MSM clients and their families have access to psychosocial support, particularly those struggling with coming out, disclosure, acceptance, and family dynamics.