In June 2004, Richard Feachem, the Fund’s Executive Director, informed the board, “We have developed the so-called ‘Executive Dashboard’, an IT-based tracking and reporting tool, which will allow us to monitor progress against agreed targets on an ongoing basis and intervene early when there are signs of slippage.”

A year later, the Executive Dashboard was made available from the Fund’s home page at www.theglobalfund.org/en/files/executive_dashboard.pdf.

The Dashboard is a series of graphs which are updated monthly and are intended to capture the Fund’s progress. The five main graphs show the following, with further graphs providing additional details:

• Resource mobilization (Primarily, money contributed as compared to pledges and internal targets for resource mobilization, by year)
• Proposal management (Primarily, grant agreements signed as a share of the total number of approved grants, by round)
• Grant negotiation (Primarily, the median proposal handling time, from proposal submission to board approval, to grant signing, to first disbursement, by quarter)
• Disbursement and grant management (Primarily, cumulative actual disbursements by quarter, compared to targets set from time to time by the Executive Director)
• Business services (Primarily, total secretariat cost as a percentage of total grant commitments)

Many of the graphs show useful information, though some are hard to understand. However, the main weakness is that many of them do not show any targets, which means that they do not in fact provide a basis whereby the Fund can “intervene early when there are signs of slippage.” This is unfortunate, because the whole premise of the Fund is that the Fund, and its grants, are “results-based,” with continued funding only being guaranteed when there is evidence that planned results are being delivered more-or-less on time.