Time: 15.00
Venue: Community Village
Reporters: UMUBYEYI Benie Raissa and Mahoro Gisele

The theme of the session was sustainability, transitioning and co-financing Global Fund. The regional platform MENA is divided into two: the platform for the English and Portuguese speaking countries and the platform for the French speaking countries.

Amal Elkavovoaw, the Coordinator of the regional platform, highlighted that most of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa do not fully understand what the Global Fund transition is all about. She defined this transition as the mechanism whereby each country will move towards full funding and implementing its health program including that related to AIDS, Malaria and TB without Global Fund support. She highlighted the need for the civil society to be educated about the transition. Even though MENA and other African countries are not yet ready economically for transition, she encouraged the governments to start thinking critically about the allocation of more money to fund health.

Prof Mesbalie from Algeria presented the case of Algeria as a country in the transition phase. Algeria has a policy on financing the health sector. Since 2016 the country has invested over 6.6 billion USD in health programs. The situational analysis conducted shows that the epidemics within the key population has significantly abated. This provides evidence that investment in strengthening the health systems response will have positive impact on the HIV response.

Dr Mohamed El Khamas described how Morocco made the choice to be in the transition in 2006. Since then the funding support from Global Fund has being reducing. In 2018, an action plan was developed to enable Morocco to officially move into transition. One of the area of focus of the action plan was strengthening the coordination mechanism for the response, and creating synergy and dynamism for key population response.