About the Strategic Initiative

While major global TB indicators like treatment success have improved and mortality rates have fallen in past years, there is a persistent gap in the number of people who fail to receive adequate TB care each year. National TB control Programs (NTP) and their partners are increasingly focused on trying to close this gap and Stop TB’s Global Plan to End TB and WHO’s End TB Strategy both seek to ensure that all people who are sick are identified and can receive adequate treatment. Global momentum for improving TB case detection and notification further gained track in 2017 when the Global Fund (GF) put in place its  Catalytic Investments Framework. The Catalytic Investments are earmarked for different focus areas to catalyze more impact of Global Fund support to countries, such as through Matching Funds that aim at incentivizing the programming of country allocations.

For the priority area TB, the Matching Funding focuses on finding the missing people with TB. 12 countries[1] are receiving this investment, accounting together for 75% of all people with drug-susceptible (DS)-TB and 55% of all people with drug-resistant (DR)-TB who are currently missed globally. A total value of USD 115 million has been made available to these priority countries to improve TB case detection and treatment through innovative and comprehensive case finding approaches during the Global Fund Funding Cycle 2018-2020.

To further support accelerated, innovative case finding in priority countries, the Global Fund has made available an additional USD 10 million through the Strategic Initiative to Reach the People with TB who are Missed, and commissioned Stop TB Partnership and the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide comprehensive and targeted technical country support for the period 2017/18-2020. The ambitious goal of the Strategic Initiative (SI) is to find 1.5 million additional people with DS-TB and DR-TB in 13 priority countries by the end of 2019 (baseline: end of 2015), marking an unprecedented ambition level for the TB community.

The Global Fund, Stop TB Partnership, WHO, countries and partners are all sharing this ambitious target and are jointly held accountable in their action and impact. Stop TB Partnership and WHO follow a joint work plan to cover different areas of supporting countries in their planning, implementation, and monitoring of enhanced case detection interventions, as stipulated in their Global Fund approved Funding Requests/Matching Funding plans.

More details on the technical support made available through the Strategic Initiative can be found under “Our Work”.

More details on the different TB case finding interventions that are being implemented in the countries can be found under “Countries”.

[1] These countries are: Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Kenya, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania and Ukraine.