EPIC.

Meeting Targets and Maintaining Epidemic Control.

Background

Meeting Targets and Maintaining Epidemic Control (EpiC), a five-year global project funded by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is dedicated to achieving and maintaining HIV epidemic control.

The project provides strategic technical assistance (TA) and direct service delivery (DSD) to break through barriers to 95-95-95 and promote self-reliant management of national HIV programs by improving HIV case-finding, prevention, treatment programming, and viral load suppression.

EpiC is one of USAID’s Office of HIV/AIDS central PEPFAR awards and is designed to accept funding from USAID missions interested in expanding or initiating programs that address their epidemic control needs. The EpiC consortium works in partnership with and strengthens the capacity of governments, civil society organizations (CSOs), other PEPFAR implementing partners, and the private sector to introduce innovations and expand evidence-based HIV services to unprecedented levels of scale, coverage, quality, effectiveness, and efficiency.

The EpiC team’s approach to TA is guided by four mutually reinforcing principles:

a focus on speed, scale, standards, and sustainability;

customization according to local priorities, financing, epidemiology, and the differentiated needs of target populations;

adaptive management based on results; and

transition of TA and DSD to local and regional partners to enable them to receive direct awards. In addition, EpiC applies human-centered design thinking to resolve persistent challenges along the HIV service cascade


Key Population Investment Fund (KPIF) in Nigeria

  • 2-year program to be implemented in Niger and Bayelsa states
  • Focus on accelerating current key and priority population programs: female sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender persons, people who inject drugs and prisoners
  • Implementing all aspects of HIV cascade (community to clinical and prevention to viral suppression)
  • Working directly with governments, KP-led and KP-competent organizations to deliver comprehensive community-based programs

Key partners

EpiC is led by FHI 360 with core partners Right to Care, Palladium, Population Services International (PSI), and Gobee Group. The project also draws upon regional resource partners (Africa Capacity Alliance, Enda Santé, Thai Red Cross AIDS Research Center, University of the West Indies, VHS-YRG Care) to provide TA, as well as global resource partners who bring unique capacities (Aurum Institute, Dimagi, JSI Research and Training Institute, Inc, Johns Hopkins University Key Populations Program, MTV, World Vision International).

  • To improve learning in reading, math and science in line with Basic Non-Formal Education Curriculum for Integrated Qura'nic Schools
  • To improve sustainable reading delivery systems in public primary schools
  • To develop Hausa reading materials for upper grades Primary four to primary six

Objectives

Attain and maintain HIV epidemic control among at-risk adult men, women and priority populations

Attain and maintain HIV epidemic control among key populations

Improve program management, health information systems, human resources for health and HIV financing solutions to attain and maintain epidemic control

Support the transition of direct funding and implementation to capable local partners to meet PEPFAR’s goal of providing 70 percent of its funding to local partners by 2020

Project activity

Increased access to pre-exposure prophylaxis and tuberculosis prevention services

Expanded implementation of HIV self-testing, index testing and network testing strategies

Improved treatment literacy, including transformative undetectable = untransmittable messages

Wider range of differentiated and key-population-competent health services, including violence prevention and response

Better access to new first-line antiretroviral therapy and viral-load testing servicess

Increased use of online platforms to engage previously unreached individuals and connect them to HIV services

Performance on each indicator

6,449

HFR - HTS_TST_POS

6,452

HFR - TX_NEW

6,431

HFR - TX_CURR

9,688

HFR - PrEP_NEW