Originally a part of a pilot project established by the Office of the US Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) to provide urgent, short-term technical support to countries receiving grants from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the LMS Cote d’Ivoire project now receives field support funding from PEPFAR  to build the capacity of the Country Coordinating Mechanism (CCM) in Cote d’Ivoire over a longer period of time. Focused on strengthening leadership and management skills, the LMS project is working not only to build the capacity of the current members in the five functions of a CCM, but also to build a sustainable CCM orientation program to ensure that as regular membership renewal occurs, the CCM will continue to function at a high level.

RESULTS IN COUNTRY

LMS has helped the CCM achieve results in several areas including senior leadership development and governance; proposal development; monitoring and evaluation; resource mobilization and donor harmonization.

• In July 2009, the Cote d’Ivoire CCM received official legal status as a non-governmental organization affiliated with the Ministry of Health.
  
• Cote d’Ivoire received a $181 million HIV/AIDS award and a $49 million TB award from the Global Fund.
  
• Forty CCM members received training in developing and using executive management dashboards, with a practical exercise of loading data to the dashboards and conducting a data analysis. This exercise alerted the CCM and Ministry of Health to a potential stock-out of essential medicines in some warehouses, and gave them the opportunity to successfully avoid it.
  

  EXPERIENCE IN COUNTRY

• Capacity Building of the CCM
  
• Senior Leadership Development Program

Capacity Building of the CCM

LMS technical assistance will clarify the five functions of a CCM for each member and transform the CCM into a cohesive body that is a critical and effective player in rallying all sectors within the country to combat the diseases of HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and TB. There are two general program objectives for the LMS intervention:

1.  The Cote d’Ivoire Global Fund CCM, Executive Committee, and Proposal Development Committee have strengthened capacity to develop high quality, multi-sectoral proposals in HIV/AIDS.

2.  The Cote d’Ivoire Global Fund CCM and CCM secretariat have strengthened capacity for governance, oversight and monitoring of the Global Fund grants.

The five functions of a CCM include Governance, Harmonization of Resources, Proposal Development, Monitoring & Evaluation, and Communication. LMS will focus on each of these areas over the course of this program.

Senior Leadership Development Program

LMS is offering a three part workshop on Leadership Development  to the 25 members of the CCM (permanent members and substitutes) to strengthen leadership and management of the CCM through capacity building on the eight leading and managing practices  for strengthening leadership and governance in complex conditions. An adapted version of LMS’s flagship program, this LDP offering features field visits at the beginning of the workshops to sub-recipient sites. These visits to the HIV service delivery sites have provided CCM members, often for the first time, the opportunity to see firsthand the management and leadership challenges facing HIV AIDS programs in their country. These visits are designed to reinforce the links between the high level decision makers, those who implement the programs, and the beneficiaries whom the Global Fund grants are ultimately designed to support. By immersing the members of the CCM in the daily challenges faced by the sub-recipients of the Global Fund grants, LMS is working with them to identify the role that CCM members can play to better support these sub-recipients to achieve their expected results.

Over the course of the program, each sub-committee of the CCM will be asked to create an action plan to address either committee specific or general CCM challenges. By working in teams and having the team commitment, the work itself becomes a constant test of a team’s ability to govern itself well and do it in a transparent way.