ICF “Alliance for Public Health” in partnership with Contact Network (Switzerland) and AIDS Foundation-East-West (AFEW, the Netherlands) have conducted the second meeting for development of a regional program to the Global Fund on HIV and Tuberculosis responses among key populations in the Cities of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This meeting took place on the 21-22 January 2016 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
The goal of this program is the achievement of the UNAIDS model of ’90-90-90′ for key populations in cities of the EECA region as well as the to follow the End TB Strategy and the new Global Plan to Stop TBthrough the development of a Regional City Platform with the twinning and mentoring of cities in Western Europe. This platform provides for the sharing of experiences/best practices, development of political leadership among city policy makers, sustainable scale-up of services by developing an enabling environment and a conducive regulatory framework in cities, including sustainable funding to NGO service providers from municipal budgets. Key topics are: development of city service models, policies for key populations and HIV/TB/Hepatitis; political and financial engagement and collaboration between city authorities and NGOs.
NGO representatives from 10 countries, international stakeholders (UNAIDS, Global Fund), key population networks (SWAN, ENPUD, SCN, ECOM, ECUO), Stop TB Partnership and cities municipalities’ representatives took part in this meeting.
Participants discussed and endorsed the main objectives of the Concept Note as well as interventions and expected outputs of the programme. Also criteria for final cities’ selection were agreed.
The cities selected for the intervention in EECA are: Soligorsk (Belarus), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Sofia (Bulgaria), Tbilisi (Georgia), Almaty (Kazakhstan), Bishkek, Osh (Kyrgyzstan), Beltsi (Moldova), St. Petersburg, (Russian Federation), Bucharest (Romania), Kyiv, Odesa (Ukraine).