Country-Steered Review (CSR) of the Global Fund

The Global Fund is currently developing a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework to accompany the new Global Fund strategy 2023 – 2028. To support the development of this M&E framework, the Global FundBoard’s Strategy Committee (SC) has set up an informal inter-Board committee M&E working group, comprising members of the Strategy Committee, the Ethics and Governance Committee and the Audit and Finance Committee, together with Global Fund Secretariat staff and the Technical Evaluation Reference Group (TERG) chair.

Some members of the SC and M&E working group have advocated for the Global Fund to initiate some form of a regular, independent, anonymized review or country-steered assessment process that would provide a confidential channel for Global Fund implementing partners to provide feedback on strengths and challenges of the Global Fund business processes and policies they are experiencing with developing, implementing and closing Global Fund grants. This anonymized feedback would be presented directly to the SC and the Board, as well as the Secretariat. While the Secretariat does currently solicit feedback from implementer countries on the grant application process, the information includes certain identifiable characteristics of respondents (e.g., country name, the nature of relations with the Global Fund) to allow the Secretariat to provide targeted support where needed. There appears to be appetite within implementer countries to have access to a feedback mechanism that they have helped to design and that covers Global Fund policies as well as processes guiding the application, implementation, revision, reporting and close out stages of grant management and that allows for anonymized feedback.

Between 2017 and 2021 the TERG funded ‘Prospective Country Evaluations’ (PCE) in eight countries with local evaluation teams. A large part of the evaluation work focused on the Global Fund business model or processes and how they impacted on grant management and implementation in the eight countries. The PCE teams found that countries encountered a number of challenges in complying with Global Fund mandated processes. Due to the fact that the PCEs were clearly tied to specific countries, and country specific findings needed to be shared and discussed with Secretariat country teams, there were times when the findings were toned down. Despite this, PCE teams of ten provided useful insights into how the Global Fund worked at the ‘coal face’, and found that there had been both positive movement that assisted countries to implement their grants along with ongoing challenges with some aspects of the business model.

Download RFP in English