» Meeting Targets and Maintaining Epidemic Control (EpiC)

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,standard, and sustainability. Customization according to local priorities, financing, epidemiology, and the differentiated needs of target population. 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 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). Achieving Health Nigeria Initiative (AHNi) is a subgrantee to FHI 360 on the EpiC project in Nigeria. AHNi supports implementation and provides strategic technical assistance to community-based organisations implementing the EpiC project in Nigeria.

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 activities

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 services Increased use of online platforms to engage previously unreached individuals and connect them to HIV services using the Social Media Assisted Reach out Techniques (SMART) and Social Web Interactive Platforms for client Engagement (SWIPE) strategies.