Grant-making for the Next Funding Cycle – Updates

Grant-making for the Next Funding Cycle

10 February 2023

Updated 10 February 2022

Grant-making in GC7

Following funding request submission, the grant-making process will kick off as in-country partners and Global Fund Country Teams collaborate to translate funding requests into quality grants. A key objective is to ensure grants are ready to implement once the grant starts.

To support in-country partners, the Global Fund is holding the following information sessions:

• Introduction to grant-making – Tuesday, 21 March from 14:00-16:30 (Geneva time). The objective of this session is to walk through the grant-making process and key considerations for Grant Cycle 7.
• Completing grant-making – Thursday, 23 March from 14:00-16:30 (Geneva time). The objective of this session is to provide detailed guidance to PRs, LFAs and CCM Secretariats (and any other stakeholders who are directly involved) on how to complete grant-making in a timely and quality manner.

The sessions will be simultaneously interpreted in French and Spanish. Participants will also be able to ask questions on grant-making during a Q&A. Additional Q&A sessions will be scheduled in the following weeks (dates and times will be shared in advance). Invitations will be shared in the coming weeks.

It is never too early to start preparing the translation of the funding request into a grant. This process is called grant-making and is defined by Principal Recipients (PRs) and Country Teams working together to design a grant, with support from Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCMs) and Local Fund Agents (LFAs). This collaboration is key to ensure that grants are ready to start implementation (“implementation-ready”) on the first day of their respective implementation periods.

PRs and Country Teams will also be discussing country needs and matching areas of the new Global Fund Strategy that enable them to reach global goals by 2030. These include strengthening community engagement, data collection and analysis for fact-driven decision-making, and pandemic preparedness, to name a few.

During January/February 2023, the Global Fund will hold information sessions for in-country partners to explain the grant-making process, what’s expected during this time and how to prepare.

The following key changes have been made to focus and strengthen grant-making for the upcoming cycle:

1. Integrated planning and ensuring implementation readiness. Early planning allows implementing countries to sign grants early enough to ensure PRs can start implementing activities on day one of the implementation period start date.

   Advanced grant-making is strongly encouraged where the applicant has been selected for the Program Continuation application approach or where the applicant has chosen to continue with the existing PR.

   Applicants advance grant-making by engaging selected PRs early during country dialogue; the aim is to develop key funding request documents with a level of detail required during the grant-making stage of the process, such as:

   • The Performance Framework includes PR-specific coverage indicators and targets, including disaggregation where applicable, with a six-month reporting frequency (for High Impact and Core portfolios).
   • The Detailed Budget includes PR-specific budget lines at the cost input level (for High Impact and Core portfolios), detailed assumptions to support accurate unit costs, and ringfenced sub-recipient budgets.
   • The Health Product Management Template (HPMT) includes detailed assumptions to support accurate unit costs.

2. Enabling timely and quality grant-making. The following changes have been made:

   • The grant signature process for PRs and CCMs is initiated prior to Board approval, subject to the recommendation of the Global Fund Grant Approvals Committee; and
   • Key steps are moving to the Global Fund Partner Portal to increase transparency and accountability.

If you have any questions, please contact your Country Team.