Focus Country | Madagascar
Overview
The Tuberculosis in the Mining Sector in Southern Africa (TIMS) is a regional catalytic project funded by the Global Fund. The project has earlier been implemented through two phases, TIMS I and TIMS II involving 10 countries. In order to sustain the gains from the two phases, Global Fund made available to RCM an additional grant of US$10.5 million to implement phase 3 of the project (July 2021 to June 2024) with expanded geographic scope involving all the SADC countries. As opposed to the previous phases, in TIMS phase III (TIMS III) the project shall not focus on services delivery at national level but on strengthening multi-country and multisectoral co-ordination and accountability mechanism for TB in the mines in the SADC region. Service delivery is anticipated to be directly supported through country specific grants by the Global Fund for qualifying countries. However, through the regional project some countries shall be supported in specific areas related generally to strengthening systems for occupational health and compensation, supporting development of private sector led TB in the mines initiatives for sustainability, and enhancing the ability of participation of key population to effectively participate in the governance structures at national and regional level regarding control of TB in the mines. In designing phase III of the TIMS project, the RCM considered a number of issues including lessons and progress from previous phases of the project, the nature and scale of the mining industry in each country, the need for sustainability of TIMS initiatives in the region, variation amongst the SADC countries on the problem of TB in the mines, and practicability of implementation of an intervention in a country, among others. Therefore, in the funding request (FR) a differentiated approach was adopted in the implementation of certain initiatives to avoid a “one size fits all” approach. This basically implies, certain intervention shall cut across all the SADC countries while others will only be implemented in some countries.
