Call for Proposals: Preventing Deaths among Adults and Children by Simplifying Advanced HIV Disease Management

Unitaid is pleased to announce a new Call for Proposals for the area for intervention: Optimizing the management of coinfections and comorbidities in people living with HIV.

Building on prior work to introduce accessible optimal tools for screening and diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of Advanced HIV Disease (AHD) in low- and middle-income countries, Unitaid seeks to further support simplification and decentralization of the AHD care package, including for children.

Specifically, the objective of this call for proposals is to identify interventions that can support the adoption of optimized AHD packages of care, and innovative delivery models to manage AHD for people living with HIV, including children living with HIV, enabling further simplification and decentralization of AHD management.

The objective of this call for proposals is to identify interventions that can support the expanded use of optimized AHD packages of care (catalyzing their introduction into simplified packages of care) and provide robust operational evidence on innovative delivery models to manage AHD for people living with HIV, and with particular attention to children living with HIV, enabling further simplification and decentralization of AHD management.

Under this call, Unitaid is soliciting proposals that can support the objective of reducing mortality by:

  • Supporting innovative approaches to improve implementation and enable increased utilization of the STOP-AIDS toolkit to prevent, diagnose, and treat AHD-associated opportunistic infections in pediatric populations through:

    – Supporting introduction of the toolkit in selected early-adopter countries to enable and accelerate expanded access conditions to life-saving tools,

    – And generating operational evidence on the implementation of the toolkit, to optimize and demonstrate the effective use of existing under-used and new tools in real-life high-burden settings.

  • Supporting introduction of emerging tools that could complement the current care package recommended by WHO for adults and adolescents living with HIV to enable further simplification in selected early-adopter countries and early management of main drivers of death that remain unaddressed (DH, SBIs) and/or that can be further optimized with recent products entering the market (CM).

Areas Out of Scope For This Call Include Proposals:

  • Focusing on the development of products still in the pipeline or large clinical trials,
  • Aiming to deliver services without a focus on optimizing and supporting expanded access to under-used and/or new commodities referred to above for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of opportunistic infections,
  • Aiming for full-scale implementation and/or delivery of products.

Proposals submitted should clearly demonstrate the fit with the objective(s) set out above, the expected impact and value for money as well as the complementarity and added value to similar projects in this area. Engagement with affected communities is a critical determinant for project/program success.

All proposals are required to clearly indicate the role of affected communities and planned collaborations with other relevant groups including grassroots community organizations and Civil Society Organizations.

Meaningful engagement with these important groups should be included at all stages of proposed activities, for example, integration of both community and civil society engagement into project design, development, and implementation.

Impact We Are Seeking

Through this Call for Proposals, Unitaid aims to increase equitable access to optimal products for AHD management in adults and children in the following ways:

  • Further demonstrating decentralized delivery models for AHD care to prevent loss to follow-up along the care cascade.
  • Generating real-world evidence regarding optimal strategies and delivery models for rapid diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of HIV-associated infections in children.
  • Facilitating adoption and implementation of WHO Advanced HIV Disease guidance (including recent cryptococcal meningitis 10 and histoplasmosis guidelines 11 and STOP AIDS toolkit 4 and expanding access to and use of optimized components of such packages of care, to enable further scale up.

Application

  • Applicants should be clear about the underlying assumptions made in their proposed approach and should highlight any major risks or other factors that may affect the delivery of results.
  • Finally, proposals are expected to outline a lean, concrete, and clear pathway to results and impact.
  • After assessment of the proposals and endorsement by the Unitaid Board, all applicants will be officially notified as to whether they will be invited to develop a full grant agreement for Unitaid funding.

Proposals, including all annexes, should be submitted electronically to proposalsUnitaid@who.int. The closing date for receipt of full proposals is 20th January 2023 at 12:00 (noon) CET. Applications received past the indicated deadline will not be considered.

Please note, a proposal is considered submitted only once you receive an e-mail message of confirmation of receipt from Unitaid.

For more information: https://unitaid.org/call-for-proposal/preventing-deaths-among-adults-and-children-by-simplifying-advanced-hiv-disease-management/#en

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