gavi csce learning briefs

Today’s global health, development and humanitarian challenges are inherently shaped by the local contexts and dynamics of the communities we serve. Under Gavi 5.0, the future of country support must be grounded in innovative, trust-based partnerships with local actors, government agencies and TA partners. Realizing this localization agenda entails meaningfully shifting resources, decision making and implementation authority to CSOs and local private sector organizations in and from the places where development support is being directed. CSOs in particular are essential to helping Gavi reach its 5.0 goals, specifically related to zero dose and under-immunized children.

It is therefore imperative for Gavi to foster an enabling environment for inclusion of local CSOs in Gavi’s partner ecosystem, in contexts where this makes sense, from planning through implementation, including enabling them to access funding made available by Gavi for countries. Given that CSO engagement and localization have been happening across various teams at Gavi, we created a set of Learning Briefs to highlight how CSOs have recently been successfully engaged in Gavi processes.  These Learning Briefs explore best practices and lessons learned with regards to engaging CSOs in FPP processes in Bangladesh, Cameroon, and Uganda and a few cross-cutting lessons were identified including:

• Investing in the right organization or person to identify, coordinate, organize and prepare CSOs in the FPP in country dialogue is key. This can take different forms in different contexts, but the commonality across all three is that it is helpful to find an organization or person who understands where BOTH CSOs and the government are coming from and can bring a diplomatic approach to the process.
• Identifying local level CSOs is a significant task unto itself, requiring dedicated time and resourcing, as the more widely known and identified CSOs that the government is already working with and are “on the radar” may not be the same as those working at the grassroots level with zero dose children etc.
• Being a SC member lent credibility/ clout to the person organizing the process and equipped them with deep knowledge on the process that they then dispersed/ shared/ leveraged.