International HIV/AIDS Alliance makes recommendations for better global support for orphans and other vulnerable children (30 September 2005)
Summary: At a recent Expert Meeting on Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in The Hague, the Alliance presented a paper on Global Fund support to orphans and vulnerable children, making recommendations to ensure that support for orphans and vulnerable children is included in Global Fund proposals.
At a recent Expert Meeting on Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in The Hague, the Alliance presented a paper on Global Fund support to orphans and vulnerable children, making recommendations to ensure that support for orphans and vulnerable children is included in Global Fund proposals.
The Global Fund, if resourced appropriately, has the potential to support a significant proportion of the $6.4 billion that is needed to respond to the needs of orphans and other vulnerable children (OVC) between 2006-8. Yet Save the Children’s analysis in 2004 of Rounds 1-3 identified that less than 3% of the summaries of proposals mentioned OVC.
Recommendations from the Alliance presentation included:
- Identifying ways to ensure that support for OVC is included in country proposals submitted to the Global Fund.
- Identifying countries that have failed to include support to OVC in multiple rounds and assisting them with appropriate technical support from UN agencies, bilateral donors and NGOs to raise the quality of proposals.
- Addressing the lack of representation on Country Coordinating Mechanisms of groups working with OVC and representatives of orphans and vulnerable children.
- Ensuring that funding gets to the community level. Bottlenecks in disbursements need to be identified and strategies developed to address them.
- Ensuring that guidelines for proposals are strong enough with reference to support for OVC.
- Checking whether the Technical Review Panel has sufficient understanding of the needs of orphans and vulnerable children and examining how this can this be improved.
The meeting, organised by Plan Netherlands and UNICEF Netherlands in co-operation with the Dutch OVC Working Group, is expected to follow up on the recommendations and convene again to discuss their implementation. Plan Netherlands will be producing a report of the meeting.
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