START PREPARING NOW FOR ROUND 8!

Author:

Bernard Rivers

Article Type:

Article Number: 1

ABSTRACT The Global Fund is scheduled to issue its Call for Proposals for Round 8 on 1 March 2008. From that date, applicants will have 120 days to prepare and submit their proposals. Most applicants in recent rounds of funding have had to rush to get their proposals completed on time, and some have failed to get their proposals approved because of that rush. So the time to start is now.

The Global Fund is scheduled to issue its Call for Proposals for Round 8 on 1 March 2008. From that date, applicants will have 120 days to prepare and submit their proposals. This may sound like a fair amount of time but, in our experience, most applicants in recent rounds of funding have had to rush to get their proposals completed on time, and some have failed to get their proposals approved because of that rush.

Applicants will need most of the 120 days just to fill out what has always been a rather complicated proposal form and to obtain the necessary agreements and signatures. For this reason, and because the Global Fund requires that CCMs engage in a process of soliciting and reviewing in-country submissions for possible inclusion in the CCM’s proposal – a process that itself could take a couple of months – we recommend that in all rounds, CCMs begin working on their proposals several months ahead of the Call for Proposals.

Global Fund requirements state, in effect, that the process to be followed by CCMs should be as follows:

1. The CCM publicly invites a broad range of stakeholders within the country to develop suggestions as to what should be included in the proposal that the CCM will send to the Global Fund.
2. The stakeholders prepare their suggestions and send them to the CCM. (These suggestions are contained in what we refer to as in-country submissions.)
3. The CCM reviews the in-country submissions, and decides which ones will be incorporated into (or, at least, reflected in) the CCM proposal.
4. The CCM completes the Fund’s proposal form, gets it signed by all CCM members, and submits it to the Fund.

Doing this thoroughly will take some applicants longer than the 120 days between the Call for Proposals and the application deadline. But there’s no reason not to start the process now. Steps (1) through (3) can all be worked on before the Fund issues its Call for Proposals and publishes the Round 8 proposal form. Furthermore, applicants can review the Round 7 proposal form and guidelines (at www.theglobalfund.org/en/apply/call7) to see the basic conceptual approach – goals, objectives, service delivery areas, major activities, indicators, targets and budgets – that has been used in recent rounds and will be used again in Round 8.

A CCM that wants to be ahead of the game for Round 8 will request in-country submissions and invite suggestions from a broad range of other stakeholders, review these, and do serous work designing the project(s) that it wants the Global Fund to finance – BEFORE the Fund issues its Call for Proposals two-and-a-half months from now.

The following extract from the recently released “Aidspan Guide to Building and Running and Effective CCM – Second Edition” (CCM Guide) explains how CCMs can manage the proposal development process:

In order to manage the process of developing a proposal, we suggest:

• that the CCM form a proposal development team, made up of CCM members representing the different stakeholders; and
• that the proposal development team coordinate the proposal development process, including soliciting and reviewing in-country submissions and writing, or overseeing the writing of, the final proposal.

The CCM could decide to add some [outside] resource persons to the proposal development team if it makes sense to do so….

The proposal development team should define the proposal development process that will be followed, complete with timelines.

Establishing a proposal development team does not diminish the responsibility of the entire CCM for the proposal development process and the proposal itself (which all CCM members have to sign). It is just a way of permitting the CCM to manage the process.

At the outset of the proposal development process, the CCM should review the six minimum requirements for CCMs to ensure that it meets the requirements.

Copies of Aidspan’s CCM Guide are available at www.aidspan.org/guides.

The CCM Guide also contains a section on ways in which the CCM can manage the in-country submissions process.

The Global Fund has not provided a template for CCMs to use for in-country submissions. Individual CCMs can always develop their own template, but this is not an easy task. In the absence of any template, some CCMs have asked those developing in-country submissions to use the proposal form that the CCM has to use when submitting full proposals to the Global Fund. This leads to those developing in-country submissions having to do lots of unnecessary and possibly confusing work, because there are large sections of the Global Fund’s proposal form – relating to the CCM itself and to the national context – that organisations preparing in-country submissions do not in fact need to deal with.

Consequently, Aidspan has, for the first time, prepared a sample template that CCMs can adapt for use in their in-country submissions process. This is described in a separate article, “News: Aidspan Documents for ‘In-Country Submissions’ Are Released, to Help with Round 8 Applications,” in this issue of GFO.

Note: As Aidspan (publisher of GFO) has done since Round 4, we will prepare an “Aidspan Guide to Round 8 Applications to the Global Fund,” the first part of which will be released in January and the second part of which will be released as soon as possible after the Round 8 proposal form is published by the Fund on 1 March.