The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria now provides national malaria control programs with numerous ways of applying for grants and receiving funding. This Roadmap is an attempt at providing program managers and staff with an overview of these opportunities and links to the Global Fund website for more information.
Round-based funding
The Round-based funding opportunity was launched in April 2002 and the GF has since approved close to USD 16 billion funding for AIDS, TB and Malaria.
In response to a call for proposals, Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCMs) submit one or more disease-specific proposals. Since Round 8, CCMs also have the possibility of submitting cross-cutting Health System Strengthening (HSS) requests as part of a disease-specific proposal.
The following diagram gives an overview of the process underlying Round-based funding.
Submitted proposals are reviewed by members of the Technical Review Panel (TRP), who are international experts on HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria and cross-cutting HSS issues. The TRP outlines the main strengths and weaknesses of proposals and issues recommendations to the GF Board for proposal approval. The GF board then decides during their annual meeting whether to follow (or not) TRP recommendations. The GF then enters a phase of negotiating grants for successful proposals with CCMs, leading to the signature of a grant agreement: in the first instance, the first two years of the grant is approved for funding (Phase I), while the remaining years (in general 3) are given preliminary approval based on performance shown during Phase I (Phase II).
More information is available on the GF website.
Before the end of Phase I, the GF invites CCMs whose grants have been performing well to submit a request for continued funding. If Phase II is approved, an updated grant agreement is agreed upon.
More details
In 2006, the GF Board approved a new mechanism for well-performing grants coming to an end, the Rolling Continuation Channel (RCC). Through the RCC, CCMs are invited to apply for up to 6 years of additional funding beyond the original proposal term.
More information
It is possible to combine existing grants (or a newly approved one with an existing one) through grant consolidation. Grant consolidation can help simplify and improve the efficiency of grant administration, for example, by reducing the number of reports required, and harmonizing monitoring and evaluation requirements. Grant consolidation may also simplify funding discussions by enabling countries to refer to Global Fund funding as a whole, rather than referring to different grants for the same disease. Additional guidance can be found in the RBM Toolbox.
AMFm
The Affordable Medicines Facility - Malaria is designed to expand access to the most effective treatment for malaria, artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). The Global Fund will reduce the manufacturer sales price of ACTs to public, private and not-for-profit sector buyers. The Global Fund will do this by negotiating a lower price for ACTs and then paying a large proportion of this directly to manufacturers on behalf of buyers (a buyer “co-payment”). The first phase of Affordable Medicines Facility – Malaria has been launched in a small group of countries, to enable lessons to be learned before expanding the initiative to other malaria-endemic countries. Applications for Phase 1 were invited from the following countries: Benin, Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. AMFm Phase 1 will operate for 24 months and will be reviewed through an independent evaluation. The Global Fund Board will consider the results of the evaluation and determine whether to expand and accelerate, or to terminate or suspend AMFm. It is expected that the Board will make this decision in 2011. The Board has clearly stated that AMFm will only be terminated if clear failures (‘red flags’) are identified during Phase 1.
More information
National Strategy Applications (NSAs)
Many countries have developed national malaria strategies to guide there programmes. However, to finance implementation of these strategies, they have usually had to prepare multiple, separate proposals to different donors. This involves high transaction costs and may not always be fully consistent with national planning and reporting. In response to country requests for streamlined processes, the GF has committed to introducing a new way to apply for GF resources - known as “National Strategy Applications” (NSAs). This involves submitting a national strategy itself rather than a Global Fund-specific proposal form – as the primary basis of the application. NSAs will be introduced through a phased roll-out, beginning in 2009 with a limited number of countries. The aim of this “First Learning Wave” of NSAs is to draw policy and operational lessons to guide the broader roll-out of the new application procedure beyond 2009. Invitations to participate in the First Learning Wave for a given disease were based on a range of factors, including the strength and duration of current national disease strategies, as well as overall geographic and disease diversity.
Azerbaijan, Bhutan, China, Guyana, Madagascar, The Gambia, and Ethiopia were invited to respond to the First Learning Wave, carried out as a two-stage process. In the first stage, a national strategy and accompanying documentation (such as an operational plan) were desk-reviewed to ensure that they contained enough information to be considered as the basis of a funding application. For countries where the outcome of this desk review was favorable, a review team undertook a country visit to seek clarifications and
collect additional information. A favourable desk review also lead to an invitation to proceed to the second stage: the CCM submitting a short application focused on the financial request for consideration by the TRP. The deadline for applications is set for 31st August 2009.
Check out the RBM Toolbox website for more information on this new funding opportunity in the future!
The package provides a cover sheet with links to various tools on the RBM website, the GFATM website, and the toolbox. All the tools assist national programmes and their partners with the development of successful applications for Global Fund grants.
These tools represent a collection of support documents for countries that are preparing grant applications for submission to the Global Fund. The tools aim at improving the quality of the applications and consequently increasing the approval rate.