THE PROBLEM

The Global Fund has created a new Health Financing Department (HFD) to lead the its work on domestic resource mobilization (DRM), value for money, innovative financing, transition and sustainability, and other essential data-driven topics. Pharos has worked recently on many of these areas, including a recent Transition and Co-Financing Review of grants transitioning under NFM3 and a newly published Guidance for Sustainability and Transition Assessments and Planning for National HIV and TB Responses.

To carry out enhanced work in these areas including DRM, the Global Fund needs to easily access data in other partner systems (e.g., World Bank, WHO, IHME) and guide and support LMIC countries to plan, monitor and report their domestic spending in a way that can be reviewed and verified by the Global Fund, as part of its dialogue with countries and efforts to manage the risks around cofinancing.

To help do this, HFD has enlisted Pharos support to assess and recommend actions to strengthen data systems to appraise, negotiate, agree, and monitor country co-financing commitments and to effectively monitor and mitigate the risk to program outcomes of incomplete compliance with those commitments.

THE PHAROS SOLUTION

The Pharos work is divided into five phases:

• Phase I: Examine and understand the GF’s existing approach to co-financing appraisal, negotiation, agreement and monitoring and risk monitoring and mitigation, covering opportunities and obstacles;
• Phase II: Determine relevant data availability from a set of GF portfolio case study countries;
• Phase III: Explore Secretariat systems and processes for requesting, collecting / collating and storing / managing relevant data;
• Phase IV: Conduct a gap analysis on data availabilty, data quality, data definition consistency, and any other bottlenecks constraining ambition on enhancement of the GF’s DRM / co-financing approach;
• Phase V: Build out actionable and concise recommendations, tested and refined with HFD staff.

Across these phases, the Pharos team will work closely with the HFD team and Global Fund leadership. The team will complete the following deliverables: a scoping note, workshops with discussion papers as relevant, and a final report with recommendations.

LOOKING AHEAD

This work will be integrated with parallel technical assistance to HFD around its processes, tools, and guidelines for cofinancing/DRM, as the Global Fund strives to monitor cofinancing performance under the current NFM3 grants (2021-24) and as it works with countries to develop financing plans and cofinancing targets and commitments for the next NFM4 round (2024-27).

Status: Ongoing, May 2022 – December 2022

Team Members Involved: Robert Hecht, Mila Dorji, Grace Chen

For more information, contact Mila Dorji at [email protected].