On 28 – 29 November 2022 the EHRA as a host of the EECA Regional Platform for communication and coordination organized in Istanbul (Turkey) the Regional Forum “Implementation of the Global Fund’s Community Engagement Technical Assistance Program in the EECA region in 2021-2022: Lessons learned and the way forward”.

The EECA Platform organized a Regional Forum for networking, exchange, and learning from existing technical and other support and particularly to review the results of the mid-term implementation of the Global Fund CE TA Program in EECA region in 2021–2022. In this Forum, the TA recipients from among the community and civil society representatives had the opportunity to engage with technical support providers and vice versa, also with the representatives of the Global Fund CE TA team and other donors, together to discuss the vision and formulate the position of civil society representatives of what Global Fund-related technical support is needed for them and how the effective mechanism of support provision should look like going forward.

Additionally, the Forum provided the opportunity to other donors and technical partners supporting or providing the Global Fund related technical support to exchange the information on their activities, coordinate their TA related work in the region and to meet with the potential recipients of their TA programs from among civil society and better understand their Global Fund related TA needs and their vision of how the mechanisms of such TA provision should work.

A similar 1st Regional Forum took place in 2019, covering the period of CRG TA implementation in EECA in 2018 – 2019, therefore this Forum enabled reflecting on the progress of the implementation of the first forum’s recommendations and compare the progress within two periods.

The Forum gathered over 30 participants from among the representatives of civil society recipients and providers of CE SI TA including from such countries as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian, Ukraine, as well as representatives of donors and technical partners.