DURATION 15 months STARTING DATE 1st February 2021 GEOGRAPHIC REACH Global PARTNER World Health Organization( WHO)
AIM
The project aims to catalyze a strong, focused, costed and well-planned national response to implement and manage action for hepatitis elimination by building technical assistance capacity in WHO regional offices and supporting planning in five WHO member states (Nigeria, Iran, Ukraine, Nepal, Lao People’s Democratic Republic)
CONTEXT
While national plans for viral hepatitis are now numerous, they are often unfocused, and most of them do not contain an adequate monitoring and evaluation logframe, precise targets, workforce needs, costing, budgeting and financing.
In August 2019 in Kathmandu, Nepal, the WHO Regional Office for the South East Asia Region (SEARO), in collaboration with WHO Secretariat, conducted a workshop with 11 countries of the region to facilitate the development of an outline of national plans that would include quantifications for indicators, targets and costing as well as other resource needs. The workshop was successful and led to the development of planning tools.
WHO will now build on the success of this workshop and replicate this approach in national-level workshops in five WHO regions, along with advocacy for national financing.
ACTION
The recipient will build capacity in WHO Regional Offices to assist countries in the preparation of well-planned and costed national hepatitis plans. WHO will provide technical support to one member state per remaining region (Nigeria, Iran, Ukraine, Nepal, Lao People’s Democratic Republic)
WHO will hold five country-focused workshops to train regional advisors on conducting ToTs (Training of Trainers) workshops. For each workshop WHO will assist the national programmes to review the country profile; set priorities; generate cost effectiveness estimates for HBV and HCV treatment; prepare a log-frame for the main activities; use the One Health Tool to estimate costs and prepare a short report with the outline of the national plan, including baseline, impact targets, service coverage targets, logframe, and costing.
Finally, the key elements of the workshop will be summarized to senior leadership at WHO country office, and within each Ministry of Health and, where possible at the Ministry of Finance. This will constitute the basis for a communication and advocacy strategy to secure resource mobilization.
EXPECTED RESULTS
At the end of the funding period, the project will have:
- Developed a final package of workshop materials.
- Trained WHO Regional Advisers for hepatitis in the four WHO regions. They will have cofacilitated the workshops to develop costed national plans and will be capable of conducting workshops to develop costed national plans.
- Implemented five country workshops.
- Five priority countries will have improved national plans and engagement with senior leadership will be created for viral hepatitis elimination.
- Newly developed hepatitis module of WHO-One Health Tool will be pilot tested and used after developing it.
CATALYTIC IMPACT
The planned approach will allow the catalyzing of the global, regional and national response by
- Sharing the results from the workshops with the national authorities and senior leadership to allow countries to develop improved national responses towards viral hepatitis elimination. This will ultimately foster access to improved prevention, testing and treatment services.
- Building capacity to the regional advisors who will then be able to further use the developed toolbox to other countries in their entire region.
- Piloting the newly developed hepatitis module of the WHO – One Health Tool and developing further improvements to the tool where necessary. This will be highly catalytic as this tool will be used as a standard for costing of national hepatitis responses in the future.