Managing Global Fund grants - do's and don'ts
01 May 2007
Senior grant managers and technical advisors from the Alliance’s three Global Fund civil society Principal Recipients – l’Alliance Nationale Contre le SIDA (ANCS), Alliance India and Alliance Ukraine – have taken part in secretariat-run training to strengthen their capacity to implement their grants.
They were also joined at the workshop in March by Alliance secretariat staff members of the newly formed Global Fund Grant Support Group (GFGSG). The group will provide technical support to civil society Principal Recipients both within and outside of the Alliance family and respond to issues raised by the Global Fund’s Global Implementation Support Team (GIST). Two GIST members from the World Health Organisation and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS also joined the training to increase their detailed knowledge of grant implementation.
GIST is a high-level forum whose monthly meetings bring together a small number of major United Nations technical agencies, funding entities, bilateral donors and non-governmental organisations to mobilise rapid, co-ordinated responses to requests for help. It also has an early warning function aimed at helping countries deal with problems before they become acute. The Alliance, the Asia Pacific Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (APN+) and the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations (ICASO) are civil society members of GIST.
The workshop went through the operational detail of each step of the grant cycle and each of the four main areas of grant management (institutional and programmatic, financial, procurement and monitoring and evaluation). Because the grant managers of India, Senegal, Western Cape Province of South Africa and Ukraine were present, participants were able to see grant management in action through detailed study and interaction with these four cases.
The participants also identified the next steps involved in continued learning, sharing of experiences and technical support required for Global Fund Grant management. The GFGSG is looking at further training events this year for Alliance sub-recipients.
The training team was John Frankish, Global Fund Co-ordinator, Department of Health, Western Cape; Duncan Earle, Team Leader, Operational Partnerships and Country Support, Global Fund; and Fareed Abdullah, Director of Technical Support, Alliance secretariat.
The workshop report should interest other civil society organisations managing, or considering managing, a Global Fund grant or those providing technical support to them. The report, including a list of do’s and don’ts on Global Fund grant implementation, can be downloaded from here.
