The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded Quality Assurance Project (QAP) and its follow on, the USAID Health Care Improvement (HCI) Project under URC have, since 2001, been engaged in work that is crucial for health system strengthening with respect to HIV and AIDS programmes and TB. These diseases require ongoing intervention, monitoring and treatment, and when they present on a mass scale, as they do in South Africa, necessitate measures that are not easy to institute. Indeed, an entire infrastructure has to be put in place wherever affected people require treatment, and especially so in rural areas, where rates of infection are high but medical facilities are scarce.

USAID’s QAP and HCI Projects intervened to answer this need, creating small but effective infrastructures at crucial nodes to support South Africa’s health systems, and to bolster the health of the population in general with basic health care programmes. This publication is a compilation of success stories written over an eight-year period to document developments supported by QAP and the HCI Project.