SHORT ITEMS

Author:

Bernard Rivers

Article Number: 6

ABSTRACT The Fund has announced an RFP for Local Fund Agents, and an appeals procedure is available for a limited number of applicants who were rejected in both Round 1 and Round 2.

The Fund has announced a “Request for Proposals” for Local Fund Agents (LFAs). As explained in detail at www.globalfundatm.org/rfp, the Fund intends to award a number of “Local Fund Agent Framework Contracts” for its worldwide operations, from which country-specific work orders will be issued. The Fund “will view favorably proposals that coordinate services across multiple countries, but will also consider high-quality proposals for single countries.” The deadline for proposal submission is 27 June. An information session will take place in Geneva on 19 May.

The Fund has instituted an Internal Appeal Mechanism which allows applicants whose proposals were rejected in two consecutive rounds to appeal the second decision. Details are available at www.globalfundatm.org/proposals.html, which states, “An Internal Appeal may be made only if it is based on a significant and obvious error made by the TRP regarding the information contained in the second proposal. No new information or new justification to what was contained in the second proposal may be introduced in an Internal Appeal.” All applicants to whom this procedure is applicable should already have been informed of this mechanism. Appeals must be received by the Fund within four weeks of receipt of notice of the mechanism. Applicants using the appeals mechanism are not allowed to submit a new proposal for the same disease while their appeal is under review. This is to avoid a situation where essentially the same proposal might be approved twice. The deadline for Round 3 is, however, set a few days after the appeals process is supposed to be concluded. This gives applicants who may be unsuccessful with their appeal the chance to submit a revised proposal for Round 3.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has just released the latest quarterly update of “Untangling the web of price reductions: a pricing guide for the purchase of ARVs for developing countries.” (See www.accessmed-msf.org/documents/untangling4thapril2003.pdf) Although the publication date is shown as April 24th, the document includes the new GlaxoSmithKline prices that were announced last week. French and Spanish versions should be ready within a few days. The document will be included as an annex to the WHO-MSF-UNICEF-UNAIDS document “Sources and prices of selected medicines and diagnostics for people living with HIV/AIDS, May 2003,” which will be released shortly.