Month: April 2019

Community and civil society mobilization is essential to safeguarding human rights of key populations and affected and vulnerable communities. This plays a crucial role towards improving uptake of health services, including those for HIV, TB, and malaria; scaling up interventions to the level necessary; accessing hardest to reach groups; advocating for transparency and accountability; and keeping implementation costs sustainable. In Global Fund grants, communities and civil society play important roles in ensuring community-centered, rights-based, and gender-transformative (CRG) HIV, TB, and malaria programming. In affirmation of this, the Global Fund Board in 2014 allocated USD15 million from 2014 to 2016 for a set of CRG Special Initiatives (CRG SI). The CRG SI has two objectives: (a) for communities and civil society to be meaningfully engaged in the design, implementation, and monitoring of supported programmes; and (b) to ensure the inclusion of technically sound interventions to address human rights, gender equality, and community systems strengthening (CSS). The CRG SI aims to support effective community and civil society engagement in Global Fund processes through the following core programmes: 1) Supporting the long-term capacity development of national and regional HIV key population networks for more effective engagement in Global Fund processes; 2) Short-term technical assistance towards effective engagement of community and civil society groups in Global Fund country dialogues and concept note development (up to grant signing); and 3) Regional CRG Communication and Coordination Platforms Under the short-term technical assistance (TA) program of the CRG SI, APCASO has been deployed to several TA assignments...