The Secretariat has provided an update on the new funding model to the Strategy, Investment and Impact Committee and the Financial and Operational Performance Committee. The update has not been made public but Aidspan has received permission to report on its contents. The Secretariat also provided Aidspan with additional information for this article. Of the 251 funding requests that are expected from countries under the NFM, 88% are either in grant-making or have already resulted in Board-approved grants. The reviewed requests represent $13.7 billion, or 93% of the $14.7 billion in allocation funding (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Status of allocation funding

Source: GF-SIIC17-02 Update on Funding Model

The deadline date for the ninth and final window for applications recently passed. The Technical Review Panel was expected to review concept notes from this window in mid-March. A simplified approach was adopted for countries representing about 6% of total funding. Some of these countries have been operating in challenging environments. Regional applications Under the NFM, $200 million was available for regional proposals for the 2014-2016 allocation period. Seventy-seven expressions of interest were received having a total value of $1.1 billion. Twenty-eight applicants were invited to submit concept notes. The total of the upper ceiling amounts provided to the 28 applicants for the preparation of their concept notes was $284 million. Out of the 28 concept notes, 19 were for HIV, three for TB/HIV, two for malaria and four for TB. The deadline for concept notes submitted in the second wave of regional proposals was 1 February 2016, so these notes are only now being reviewed. The Technical Evaluation Reference Group is planning to release an assessment of the regional applications process in June. Special initiatives The update included a section on The Global Fund’s special initiatives. Of the $100 million budgeted for these initiatives, to date $64.5 million has been spent or committed. See Table 1 for details.

Initiative	Budget	Spent or committed
Emergency fund	30.0 m	11.6 m
Community, Rights and Gender	15.0 m	12.0 m
PR capacity building	0.5 m	0.4 m
Value for money and sustainability	8.5 m	5.5 m
WHO-Stop TB partnership agreements	29.0 m	21.2 m
Country data systems	17.0 m	13.8 m
Total	100.0 m	64.5 m