When the Country Coordinating Mechanism (CCM) Guidelines are revised later this year, they will include strategies to strengthen gender expertise and achieve balanced gender representation on CCMs. In addition, gender-related indicators in the Global Fund's CCM funding policy will allow the Fund to monitor the number of CCM members trained on gender-related issues or representing organisations with a documented gender-related mandate.

The guidelines will also include sections on strengthening representation from sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender people and/or other sexual minorities. The revised CCM Guidelines will be submitted to the Global Fund Board in December.

The above information is included in two reports prepared for the Global Fund's Third Replenishment meetings that took place in March 2010. The reports said that a framework to assess the scope of activities that promote gender equality in the overall Global Fund portfolio has been developed and will be finalised in collaboration with partners during the first half of 2010. They also said that a gender analysis of HIV proposals approved in 2008 and 2009 is underway, and that the findings should be available shortly.

Other related developments include the following:

• a key performance indicator on gender and key affected groups has been developed, for use in measuring the overall performance of the Global Fund;
• gender issues will be integrated into the Grant Scorecard (used to measure the performance of individual grants at Phase 2 renewal);
• partner organisations - such as UNAIDS, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the German development agency GTZ, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the Open Society Institute - have supported countries to include strong gender components in their Round 10 proposals; and
• three technical seminars and two induction courses on gender have been conducted, reaching more than 250 staff at Global Fund headquarters.

Information for this article was taken from "Implementation of the Global Fund Gender Equality Strategy," and "The Global Fund, HIV and Sexual Orientation/Gender Identities." Both documents are at www.theglobalfund.org/en/replenishment/hague/documents. Also available on that site is a report entitled "Investment in the Health of Women and Children: Global Fund Support of Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5."