The Global Fund’s strategy includes an objective about “Promoting and protecting human rights and gender equality”, recognizing the urgent need to eliminate health disparities among men, women, adolescent girls and boys, and transgender people. With regards to TB, this objective describes the need to:

• Scale up programs to support women and girls, including programs to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights.
• Invest to reduce health inequities, including gender- and age-related disparities.
• Introduce and scale up programs that remove human rights barriers to accessing services;
• Integrate human rights considerations throughout the grant cycle and in policies and policymaking processes.
• Support the meaningful engagement of key and vulnerable populations and networks in Global Fund-related processes.

Funding requests to the Global Fund should include, as appropriate, interventions that respond to key and vulnerable populations, human rights and gender-related barriers and vulnerabilities in access to services.

Addressing gender and human rights barriers with concrete programs and gender-responsive human rights-based programming is essential to ensuring that quality TB services are available and accessible to all, in particular key and vulnerable populations.

Programs aim to work at the individual, community and provider levels to promote better access to critical TB prevention and treatment services. This includes addressing stigmatizing, discriminatory and punitive attitudes, practices, regulations, policies and laws that impede people’s access to health services. Further, programs and approaches should be adopted that recognize differences in risk and access to services based on gender, age, work status, and other factors.

Applicants can refer to the Global Fund’s Technical Brief: Gender Equity for further information on the Global Fund commitment to address gender and age-based inequities in the context of HIV, TB and malaria.

Global Fund Technical Brief Tuberculosis, Gender and Human Rights