ICASO and APCASO team up to provide human rights technical assistance

Author:

Aidspan Staff

Article Type:

Article Number: 5

Partnership aims to reduce barriers to accessing health services in 20 focus countries

ABSTRACT The International Council of AIDS Service Organizations and the Asia Pacific Council of AIDS Service Organizations have created a partnership, funded through the Global Fund’s Human Rights Strategic Initiative, to provide technical assistance to implementers of Global Fund grants in 20 countries, to reduce barriers to accessing services.

On April 4, ICASO and APCASO announced a partnership to provide technical assistance to implementers of Global Fund-supported programs, to reduce barriers preventing people from accessing HIV, tuberculosis and malaria services.

The two organizations were jointly awarded an “indefinite quantity contract” to provide services through the Global Fund’s Human Rights Strategic Initiative, after submitting a joint proposal to the Global Fund in early 2019.

The initiative will coordinate and deliver short-, medium-, and longer-term technical assistance to support the effective implementation of programs to reduce human rights-related barriers to services, as well as monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that will assess progress programs have made.

For now, technical assistance from this initiative will be available to implementers in 20 focus countries that have received human-rights matching funds from the Global Fund: Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo (province level), Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Honduras, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Mozambique, Philippines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda, and Ukraine.

Concretely, to access the services provided by the initiative, all implementers (from principal recipients to sub-sub-recipients) can request support via their country team at the Global Fund Secretariat.

To provide the technical assistance, the two organizations together will make available 75 experts in human rights and gender in the context of HIV, TB and malaria programs. Examples of the types of technical assistance to be provided include (but are not limited to) development of advocacy campaigns, training curricula, and collection and analysis of evidence related to human rights barriers.

Further reading:

• The full announcement from ICASO and APCASO (as a PDF)
• The news release on the APCASO website