Non-governmental organization

The BCP project is a PEPFAR funded joint venture between SA Partners and Africare. The project promotes early recruitment and retention of newly diagnosed PLWHA into care and support programs. The project will finalize a BCP national curriculum and establish BCP support groups in the Eastern Cape that provide information and support to newly diagnosed individuals at health facilities and within communities.

Some thirty-five civil society organizations have voiced serious concerns over the World Health Organization's publications policy, arguing that the proposed policy, if implemented, will result in a tendency towards self-censorship by the WHO and its staff and HQ offices, to the detriment of the needs and interests of public health, especially in developing countries. They are also very concerned that this policy will hamper timely advice and support by WHO HQ and regional offices to member states over important issues such as application of intellectual property rights and the use of TRIPS flexibilities, other trade and health matters, reproductive health care and other critical issues.

The Southern African Regional Poverty Network(SARPN) and the Open Society Institute of Southern Africa will be hosting a two day southern Africa regional workshop at the Sunnyside Park Hotel, Johannesburg , South Africa.

A half-day was set aside at this week's Partnership Forum in Durban for skills building. In ten separate small group sessions, participants shared their experiences concerning what was working well. The following is a summary of some of the lessons learned:

This month sees the launch of an alternative world health report, a document that will from now on appear every two years.

More than a million women have died because rich nations have failed to honour their commitments to promote sexual and reproductive health, a group of NGOs said at the launch of a new campaign in London Thursday.

The annual Forum is an international meeting bringing together around 700 participants from governments, multilateral organizations, bilateral aid donors, international foundations, national and international NGOs, women's organizations, research institutions and the private sector. It offers the opportunity to present work in progress or recent results, to find out about new work of others, to continue the analysis and debate and to measure progress on the road to correcting the 10/90 gap in health research.

The cost of Round 3 approved grants came to only $623 m., which is almost 30% less than in Round 2. This was caused, in part, by the fact that the percentage of proposals recommended by the Technical Review Panel (TRP) for approval went down. This strongly suggests that the technical merit of proposals being submitted to the Fund is not increasing, and quite possibly is decreasing. Contributory reasons might be that the countries most capable of submitting good applications had already done so in Rounds 1 and 2; that these countries are not yet ready to submit applications for follow-up projects (or don't realize that the Fund is very open to additional proposals being submitted long before earlier projects have been completed); and that some applicants particularly some NGOs and regional organizations simply don't understand that the type of application they are submitting has almost no chance of being recommended by the TRP. Behind every rejected proposal is a sad story. It is not unknown for Ministries of Health almost to come to a halt while they race to complete a Global Fund proposal. There are also sad stories behind countries that have never applied, or that were rejected once and did not try again. Clearly, therefore, there is a strong need to increase the quality and availability of Technical Assistance to help applicants with deciding whether to apply, with crafting their actual applications to the Fund, and with thinking through the underlying strategy. In addition, as more and more countries get launched on the actual implementation of their Global Fund projects, there is an increasing need for Technical Assistance regarding project relationships (e.g. between Principal Recipient and sub-recipients) and project implementation. Finally, many CCMs are inefficient, and/or are mere extensions of governments. Help is needed to overcome these problems. The Global Fund is a financing mechanism; it does not have sufficient staffing to provide technical assistance. But it could usefully do more in encouraging multi-lateral and bilateral institutions, NGOs, companies and academic institutions to offer technical assistance to countries that wish to obtain Global Fund financing.[Bernard Rivers (rivers@aidspan.org) is Executive Director of Aidspan and Editor of its GFO Newsletter.]Source: GLOBAL FUND OBSERVER (GFO) NEWSLETTER

Since the Alma Ata declaration of 1978 primary health care has gained acceptance as a strategy for making basic health services universally accessible. Enormous efforts have been put towards improving the health status and living condition of people in developing countries by NGO's and government departments.

Throughout the year and particularly at its annual meeting, the Global Forum for Health Research acts as a marketplace where problems of the 10/90 gap can be examined by a broad range of partners, i.e. representatives from governments, multilateral and bilateral aid agencies, international and national foundations and NGOs, women’s organizations, research institutions and universities, pharmaceutical companies and the media. Forum 6 is the sixth annual meeting of the Global Forum for Health Research and the first to be held in Africa: Arusha, Tanzania.