U.S. Embassy Lilongwe Offering PEPFAR Small Grants for HIV/AIDS Community Projects

The U.S. Embassy Lilongwe is pleased to announce that funding is available through its U.S. Ambassador’s PEPFAR Small Grants Program (PSPG). Below is the 2020-2021 Program Statement, outlining our funding priorities, strategic themes, and the procedures for submitting proposals for funding.  

Purpose of Small Grants: 

The PSGP is funded by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR is recognized widely for efficiently and effectively investing U.S. taxpayer dollars to save millions of lives and change the course of the HIV pandemic. Through implementation of our strategy and use of data, PEPFAR is constantly innovating to generate greater efficiencies, drive down costs, and increase our impact. PEPFAR is a key partner and investor in the Government of Malawi’s national response to combat HIV and AIDS. 

As part of this national response, the PSGP seeks to support community-run projects throughout Malawi. 

This year’s program continues to focus specifically on:

1. Promoting heath seeking behaviors and encourage back to care efforts for defaulters;
2. Disseminating HIV accurate an authentic public messages;
3. Providing solutions to stigma and discrimination;
4. Addressing treatment literacy; and
5. Enhancing HIV prevention, care and support or capacity building.

The U.S. Embassy is committed to ensuring that grantees receiving PEPFAR funds implement their programs in a way that supports transparency and accountability and respects, promotes, and protects people’s human rights.

Priority Program Areas: 

This year’s program will provide support to community organizations that work within the communities to implement projects to:

• Support accurate and authentic public messages on HIV to address mis-information and messages of hope(treatment literacy);
• Increase awareness and enhance community systems for the prevention of SGBV (sexual and gender based violence) and stigma discrimination;
• Eliminate cultural and legal barriers that result in environment that prevent equal access to health services;
• Promote prevention and encourage healthy living among recipients of care (HIV positive), prompt back to care efforts, adherence, and retention;
• Promote Household/Community led nutrition activities such as herbal gardens/nutritious crops;
• Build capacity of CSOs – proposal writing, monitoring and evaluation, record keeping, ethics, and confidentiality; and
• Support or train community press/radio to effectively disseminate HIV/AIDS messages.