In April 2021, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (The Global Fund) launched the second phase of the COVID-19 Response Mechanism (C19RM), which prioritizes a range of initiatives to better understand and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on people affected by the three diseases – including via support for community-led monitoring (CLM) interventions.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge, and in some cases overwhelm health services, we must urgently take action to understand the impact on people living with and impacted by HIV, TB, and malaria (HTM), and work to make adjustments in real-time to ensure ongoing access to, and uptake of prevention, treatment, care and support services. Community-led monitoring (CLM) is a powerful tool that rapidly generates granular data regarding the accessibility and quality of HTM prevention and treatment services (i.e. service disruptions, poor quality services, commodity stockouts, and human rights and gender-related barriers), and empowers communities to use CLM findings to identify and advocate for solutions.

The purpose of this brief is to define community-led monitoring, to explain the value of integrating CLM into funding requests to the Global Fund’s current C19RM, to provide a short overview of how CLM should be programmed and costed, to share tips to ensure that CLM is properly included in your upcoming C19RM funding request, and to share case studies of CLM in the context of COVID-19.

This Technical Brief is developed by the Anglophone Africa Platform hosted by EANNASO in collaboration with ITPC and HEALTH GAP with financial support from the Global Fund’s CRG SI.