Buying Quality Performance

According to the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) report of September 2019, at the peak of the rainy season in South Sudan, malaria accounted for nearly 70% of morbidity and more than 50% of mortality. In South East Africa, the leading cause of death for girls aged 15 to 24 is HIV and AIDS. In Pakistan, in 2018, over half a million people fell ill with TB.

This is the Request for Proposals for a unique project with the Global Fund. I have never come across a project like this, in scope, scale and potential to deliver impact. It starts in 15 countries, touching lives across Africa and Asia. It is listed here as Opportunity Mapping:

https://www.theglobalfund.org/en/business-opportunities/solicitations/

The objective is to support countries to utilise the private sector (including all non-public players, from for-profits to Community and Social Organisations (CSOs), faith-based organisations, one-person pharmacists and other INGOs and NGOs) to deliver more impactful responses to the three diseases (TB, malaria and HIV): connecting spend better with delivery and increasing performance in both quantity and quality. The project will have five stages:

1. Identity opportunities to deliver impact (Phase One);
2. Define success (starts in Phase One and continues in Phase Two);
3. Design the operating models (starts in Phase One and continues in Phase Two);
4. Deliver (Phase Two);
5. Learn and inform (Phase Two).

Our focus will be on ways to use contracting and performance management to provide the structure and achieve the defined success.

We are looking now for one or two firms to undertake Phase One (with Phase Two procurement commencing a little later). This will be a mixture of desk-based research/design with (remote) stakeholder consultation.

We are working with seven countries: DRC, Niger, Nigeria, Malawi, Pakistan, The Philippines and South Sudan. We also have a Malaria Cluster of three countries (Ghana, Kenya and Uganda), with a very specific malaria focus, and an Adolescent Girls & Young Women Cluster of five countries in South East Africa, where we are looking at shifting HIV services to results-based contracts.

The program in each country will be different. Examples might be: shifting malaria mass campaigns (which get insecticide-impregnated nets over people’s beds) to mixed activity- and results-based contracts; using a results-based contract to incentivise an intermediary to enrol, accredit and train private sector providers, to increase the quantity and quality of their TB or malaria testing, treatment and reporting; developing a new specimen transportation system (to the labs for testing), and enhancing testing activity as a result, through private sector contracting; moving local community-based organisations from budget-reimbursement to results-based contracts for HIV services, or; introducing new fee-for-service contracts in laboratories, to incentivise better maintenance and utilisation. There may be just one or multiple programs run in each country.

The firm(s) will have experience of:

• stakeholder engagement, including governments, donors and service providers in developing countries;
• service and contract design, including services for vulnerable populations, in developing countries;
• contract design, mobilization and implementation, including results-based contracting with payment models that link payments to performance;
• building and presenting business cases, such as to social investors, related to contracting opportunities.

If this might be of interest to you or someone in your network, please do follow up.