Since 2004, USAID has enhanced the Ministry of Gender, Labor, and Social Development's (MGLSD) capacity to lead, plan and manage the national OVC response. The MGLSD is mandated by the Government of Uganda to lead, manage and coordinate programs and services for orphans and other vulnerable children. The MGLSD is also responsible for providing strategic direction, coordination and monitoring of Uganda's response to OVC needs, from the national to the household level, working through Community Based Services Departments (CBSD) at the district level. In 2007, with USAID support through the CORE Initiative, the MGLSD initiated partnerships with eight regional Technical Services Organizations (TSOs) that were contracted to: 1) Assist the MGLSD in rolling out national level policies, strategies, standards, principles, guidelines, quality assurance systems, and data collection systems; and 2) Provide technical support to Districts (local government and civil society), strengthening capacity to design, plan, implement, manage and evaluate OVC services.

Despite the progress made by the above-mentioned key initiatives, the response to date does not match the magnitude of the need. Coverage, reach and impact of services to the most vulnerable children and their households remains significant, with only 23% of OVC reached to date. During the last five years, activities focused on developing national level policies and guidelines, and initiated rollout of tools, through the TSOs, at the district level. Nonetheless, in its endeavor to contribute to the roll out of the OVC response, the national OVC program continues to face the following critical gaps and challenges:

Weak coordination mechanism at national and local government levels;

District OVC strategic and annual planning remain largely unfunded and not implemented;

Inadequate resource allocations to implement OVC plans at all levels;

Absence of management of information system with functional data bases at national and district level;

Absence of quality of care in OVC programs and inadequate implementation of standard tools to measure quality of care improvement;

Absence of district level communication and advocacy strategy;

Absence of monitoring and evaluation plans at district level;

Absence of guidelines and resources to facilitate support supervision of implementing organizations at the district and lower levels;

Lack of knowledge and understanding of the magnitude of the OVC burden in each district;

Presence of civil society organizations with limited human, financial, and technical capacity to implement and sustain service delivery to OVC households;

Lack of innovative models to support family based and comprehensive care to OVC and child participation on OVC programs is limited.

REDACTED.

The TBD SLGRV activity technical assistance will foster increased capacity of districts and lower local governments to lead, plan, manage and implement a decentralized OVC response and ensure OVC quality and comprehensive care. The applicant will recognize the value of strengthened linkages between Government of Uganda (GOU), local governments, civil society, faith-based and community based organizations. The overarching programmatic goal of this activity will be to strengthen and facilitate the creation of operational district-level systems. To address some of the challenges identified above, this project shall focus on the fulfillment of the following four objectives:

1. Strengthen the capacity of local governments to lead the planning, coordination and management of comprehensive OVC care at parish, sub-county, and district levels

2. Increase the use of demand-driven multi-sectoral data in decision-making by central and local government for: coordinated, comprehensive and cost-effective OVC response; and for effective overall district social sector planning.

3. Capacity of government and civil society strengthened to facilitate and monitor provision of quality care to OVC and their families.

4. Increased advocacy and resource mobilization capacity among local government and civil society.

The development and strengthening of systems and capacity building of district officials and service providers, through this activity, is expected to deliver high quality and comprehensive care to more than one million vulnerable children. It is also envisaged that the Department of Community-based Servicesreceiving its mandate from the Children Act (1996) and OVC policy (2004)will be strengthened. This will lead to the provision of up to 50,000 vulnerable children with child protection services. At the end of five years, USAID expects that the following results would have been achieved:

All districts will have government-led management of the overall response to OVC in accordance with district OVC plan.

All districts will have a referral system in place to facilitate and track the number of OVC receiving priority services and support in accordance with district OVC plans.

80% of districts participating in this program have their capacity built to effectively monitor and evaluate OVC programs.

80% of districts can effectively manage information systems and report on key OVC and health indicators to the MGLSD and MOH and have functional OVC MIS and HMIS databases that provide routine OVC and health services data to inform planning at central and local government levels.

80% of local government and civil society organizations have capacity to monitor and measure improvement in quality of care.

50% of local government capacity strengthened to identify and cost resource gaps and to effectively advocate and mobilize resources for management needs and on behalf of OVC and families and each district has trained staff to provide coordinated care to OVC and their families.