Since 2002, the German BACKUP Initiative has provided support to governmental and non-governmental partner organisations. The following examples illustrate the achievements of more than 360 bilateral and multilateral projects in 66 countries.

BACKUP’s work centres on strengthening health systems through technical support. One of the six building blocks of health systems (‘Everybody’s Business’, WHO 2007) is leadership and governance. Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCMs) are the central Global Fund (GF) governance structure in the partner countries. BACKUP’s support to CCMs enables them to fulfil their coordinating function and to oversee GF operations and processes. With BACKUP support, the CCM in Sierra Leone has undertaken several activities to provide training for members on their roles and responsibilities and to strengthen civil society engagement. This has resulted in a well-coordinated and participative proposal development for GF Round 10 and has also solved bottlenecks in CCM oversight activities.

Everybody’s Business, WHO 2007 (pdf, 0.85 MB, English)

BACKUP provides technical support aimed at enhancing the capacity of partners to implement programmes with greater efficiency and effectiveness. Human resource development plays an important part in achieving this. 11,000 professionals in Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been trained by Regional HIV Knowledge Hubs since 2002 to manage HIV programmes more effectively. In Belarus for example, the Harm Reduction Knowledge Hub (Lithuania) trained 60 doctors and social workers on Opiate Substitution Therapy (OST) on behalf of UNDP as Principal Recipient. This enabled eight new OST projects to be implemented, effectively increasing the number of patients from 150 to 500 in 2010.

One of BACKUP’s core endeavours is to increase the participation of civil society in GF processes at country level. Since 2007, BACKUP has cooperated with the Civil Society Action Team (CSAT), which has six hubs worldwide. Together with CSAT and other partners, BACKUP supported the election of civil society representatives in the Mauritanian CCM. The GF made recommendations and made the release of suspended funds conditional on their implementation. One of these conditions was the reform of the CCM and the re-election of its members. The joint technical and financial support allowed Mauritania to conduct a participatory election of 16 new CCM members and thus to meet the conditionality of the GF in time. This process reactivated dialogue and cooperation between the main civil society networks which are now working together to re-establish the credibility of Mauritanian civil society in the fight against the three diseases.

Besides technical support for grant negotiation, consolidation and implementation, BACKUP also supports the development of proposals to the GF. In Round 9, BACKUP provided technical support in the amount of EUR 225,000 to eight countries. All countries submitted proposals to the GF and four were successful – an approval rate of 50 per cent. The grants approved by the GF reached almost EUR 560 million.

With the support of BACKUP, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) developed a gender analysis framework that is applied to the People Living with HIV Stigma Index, which has been developed through a collaboration between the Global Network of People Living with HIV (GNP+), the International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and IPPF. The gender analysis framework was applied in Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic and Ethiopia to examine stigma related data. The results will provide opportunities for policy makers, programme managers, donors and people living with HIV to explore concrete approaches to addressing the gender dimensions of HIV-related stigma and discrimination.

www.stigmaindex.org