THE GLOBAL FUND ADDS THREE NEW PRIORITY AREAS OF MATCHING FUNDS

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Download PDF The Global Fund adds three new priority areas of matching funds Matching funds are an additional funding stream that the Global Fund provides to selected countries to incentivize these countries to allocate more resources from their Global Fund allocation to its pre-determined strategic priority areas. For the 2020-2022 cycle, the Global Fund has allocated $317 million as matching…

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ABSTRACT The Global Fund has added HIV testing, condom programming, and tuberculosis preventive treatment for people living with HIV to its HIV prevention strategic priority areas to receive matching funds for 2020-2022 cycle. This is in addition to the strategic priority areas for the 2017-2019 cycle. For the 2020-2022 cycle, the application for the matching funds is integrated in the main funding request, as opposed to separate requests during the 2017-2019 cycle.

The Global Fund adds three new priority areas of matching funds

Matching funds are an additional funding stream that the Global Fund provides to selected countries to incentivize these countries to allocate more resources from their Global Fund allocation to its pre-determined strategic priority areas. For the 2020-2022 cycle, the Global Fund has allocated $317 million as matching funds to inspire the selected countries to design ambitious and evidence-based programs in priority areas. The priority areas for the 2017-2019 cycle were:

• Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention with a focus on
• adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in high HIV prevalent settings
• scaling up community-led key population programs.
• Tuberculosis (TB) treatment with increased efforts to
• find missing people with TB (i.e. those “missed” by health systems after failing to be diagnosed, treated, or reported, or patients who were treated but never reported under the national program)
• initiate strategic engagement in Western and Central Africa to find missing people with TB.
• Cross-cutting issues for the three diseases, such as
• removing human rights-related barriers to HIV, TB, and malaria services
• using data science to improve availability and use of community level data and to integrate community health data into national systems.

For the 2020–2022 cycle, the Global Fund has included three more HIV priority areas, which are:

• HIV self-testing
• Condom programming
• TB preventive treatment (TPT) for people living with HIV

The way countries apply for 2020–2022 matching funds is different from how they applied during the 2017–2019 cycle, when countries applied for matching funds separately from the main funding request. The Global Fund now requires countries to integrate the matching funds request into their main funding request.
For countries to qualify for the 2020–2022 matching funds, they must meet the Global Fund’s set conditions. Countries that received matching funds during the 2017–2019 cycle must demonstrate that they increased investment in a priority area for them to access the 2020–2022 matching funds for that priority area. Where countries have been allocated matching funds for the first time in the 2020–2022 cycle, they need to demonstrate that they have allocated funds greater than or equal to (that is, a 1:1 match) the amount available for that particular priority area.
These ‘matching conditions’ must be met for all the priority areas, except for strategic engagement in Western and Central Africa, which focuses on finding missing people with TB. Matching funds for strategic engagement in Western and Central Africa are available to five countries: Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo, Mali, and Niger. To access the matching funds for this priority area, these countries need to demonstrate an increased allocation to innovative interventions to combat TB, but the 1:1 match is not a requirement.