Stop TB Partnership

About the Challenge Facility

Challenge Facility Objectives

In order to deliver on its mission, the CFCS has the following 2 objectives:

• Assist community-based civil society organizations by:
  • Providing small grants for projects that
    • Support people infected or afected by TB to be involved in advocacting for formulation or change in policies and practices to improve TB prevention and control
    • Increase awareness and active participation of local communities in the fight against TB
    • Build capabilities of members of local communities, empowering individuals to express their rights and assume their responsibilities
  • Providing support to grant recipients to address challenges in project implementation
  • Strengthening links between grant recipients and local authorities (e.g., health services), to ensure ongoing governmental support of civil society contributions to the fight against TB
  • Bringing together different organizations and grant holders to exchange best practices in mobilizing communities and managing projects
  Communities are coming together to advocate and improve their own access to health services and increasingly organizing to plan and deliver effective healthcare on a large scale. Though it will never replace or match the national delivery of health, it can and does make a considerable contribution acting synergistically to improve access for marginalized groups, maintaining contact and referral to health services and ultimately creating a highly effective network of health interventions and community health systems.
  
  The Stop TB Partnership's Challenge Facility for Civil Society (CFCS) targets grass-roots and community-based civil society organizations that seek to help shape policy at local levels by giving a voice to people living with TB and those involved in its prevention, treatment and care. Proposals are selected by an independent selection committee composed of a maximum of 10 representatives from the community affected by TB, NGOs from developing and developed countries, NTP managers, multilateral or technical agencies.
• Efficiently manage CFCS resources by:
  • Identifying and stimulating the submission of high quality and competitive applications
    
  • Developing selection criteria that
    • Promote the collaboration with local health services / TB programs
    • Strengthen the autonomy and responsibility of local people in preventing and treating TB
    • Demonstrate the greatest promise of project sustainability
  • Holding grantees accountable to abide by project milestones, e.g., only grantees whose project review demonstrates distinctive impact are eligible to get a second (and last) grant
  • Using simple project evaluation processes and criteria that
    • Assess project results
    • Extract lessons learned
    • Integrate lessons learned in the following year’s selection and evaluation process

Grantee´s Objectives

Activities of grantees are expected to result in enhanced:

• resources for TB control
• policy to improve access to referal and services
• involvement of people infected or afected by TB into decision making bodies at different levels
• engagement in the Patient's Charter

Applications with well defined activities aimed at empowering people at the grass roots level to contribute on all aspects of TB -- multidrug-resistant TB, poverty, hard-to-reach populations, IV drug users, for example -- are welcome to apply.

Four rounds of grants have been approved.