Development of Funding Requests

The Global Fund allocates funding to countries, and each country has the right to determine for itself how it will respond to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. In the sense of country ownership, the Country Coordinating Mechanism engages its stakeholders involved in the disease response and affected by either disease in a country dialogue in order to develop funding requests. The funding requests are developed on behalf of the country as a whole and must be aligned with national strategic plans and national budgets.

While the CCM itself includes representatives of all sectors, the purpose of the country dialogue is to go beyond its membership and actively reach out to and engage with representatives of all sectors, particularly key populations. The purpose of country dialogue is to identify needs, work on national strategies, build resource mobilization efforts and prioritize intervention areas and actions that will make the most impact. This country dialogue should be an ongoing process, beginning well before the development of the concept note and continuing through implementation of the grant.

Before the actual funding request is developed, the CCM discusses the Global Fund allocation with key actor and makes a decision on the funding split between the three diseases. The CCM follows up on the willingness to pay and counterpart financing discussions with the Government of Ghana.

Using the national strategic plan as the basis, the CCM will then develop the funding request. The funding request includes four sections:

Context: Countries provide information on the current epidemiological situation related to the funding request, outline the constraints and barriers and evaluate the country’s current response to the disease.
Program Elements: In this section, the country will prioritize and provide justification for all the interventions and programs to be included in the Global Fund grant(s), and include a budget and performance framework among others.
Implementation Arrangements and Risk: After defining and costing the interventions to be funded, countries detail how these interventions will be implemented, and by whom. They also need to include any risk mitigation measures that will be put into place.
Funding Landscape, Co-financing and Sustainability: What is the current funding landscape, and what is the anticipated future funding? This allows reviewers to understand the total commitments to the disease, both from the country and from other donors. It is particularly useful in understanding where there may be funding gaps.
Prioritized Above Allocation Request (PAAR): Interventions that should but cannot yet be fully funded can be proposed here to have ‘pre-approved’ interventions to integrate into grants when savings or efficiencies are found during grant-making, or when additional funding becomes available.

The CCM submits the funding requests to the Global Fund. The Technical Review Panel will evaluate them and, if necessary, ask the country to revise and re-submit their documents. During this step of the process, the Technical Review Panel will collaborate with the CCM to ensure that the funding request is as robust as possible. Once it is satisfied that the funding request is ready for the next step, it passes its recommendation on to the Grant Approvals Committee.

e-Learning Courses of the Global Fund for more information:

Understanding the concept note development process
Achieving inclusive country dialogue