Deadline : 20-Jan-23

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

Building on previous work to introduce affordable 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 the simplification and decentralisation of the AHD care package, including for children.

Specifically, the aim of this call for proposals is to identify interventions that can support the adoption of optimised AHD care packages and innovative service delivery models to manage AHD for people living with HIV, including children living with HIV, allowing for greater simplification and decentralisation of AHD management.

Areas outside the scope of this call include proposals:

• Focusing on the development of products still in the pipeline or large clinical trials,
• With the aim of providing services without a focus on optimising and supporting expanded access to underused and/or new products for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections,
• With a view to implementing and/or delivering products on a large scale.
• The proposals submitted must clearly demonstrate their suitability for the defined objective(s), the expected impact and value for money, as well as their complementarity and added value to similar projects in this area.

Mira

• Through this Call for Proposals, Unitaid aims to increase equitable access to optimal products for the management of AHD in adults and children in the following ways:
  • It also demonstrates decentralised delivery models for AHD care to avoid the loss of follow-up along the care cascade.
  • Generate real-world evidence on optimal strategies and delivery models for rapid diagnosis, prevention and treatment of HIV-associated infections in children.
  • Facilitate the adoption and implementation of WHO guidelines on advanced HIV disease (including recent guidelines for cryptococcal meningitis and histoplasmosis [11] and STOP AIDS toolkit [4] and expand access to and use of optimised components of such care packages to enable further scale-up.

Objectives

• Under this call, Unitaid is requesting proposals that can support the goal of reducing mortality through:
  • Support innovative approaches to improve the implementation and enable greater use of the STOP-AIDS toolkit to prevent, diagnose and treat AHD-associated opportunistic infections in paediatric populations through:
    • Support the introduction of the toolkit in selected countries that have taken the first steps to enable and accelerate the conditions for expanded access to life-saving tools,
    • And to generate operational evidence on the implementation of the toolkit, to optimise and demonstrate the effective use of existing new and underused tools in real-life high-load environments.
  • Support the introduction of emerging tools that can complement the current WHO-recommended package of care for adults and adolescents living with HIV to allow for further simplification in selected countries that have early adoption and early management of key killers that remain unresolved (HD, SBI's) and/or that can be further optimised with recent products entering the market (CM).

Eligibility questionnaire 

• Answer the questionnaire to find out if your proposal could be eligible for Unitaid funding.
  • Does your proposal address at least one of the areas specified in the current open call for proposals?
  • Can your proposal plausibly demonstrate the potential to achieve global impact?
  • Is the proposed approach innovative?
  • Is your proposal sustainable and scalable?
  • Are your target countries low or middle income?
  • Does your organisation have a proven track record of implementing similar projects?
  • Is the budget in your proposal the minimum size?
  • Does your proposal demonstrate good value for money?

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