The Global Fund guides nations to get more out of medical aid with Visio

The bright primary colors in the logo bring visual cheer to the Global Fund website homepage, yet they represent three of the world’s deadliest diseases: HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. “The Global Fund is a lean, mean, modern aid machine,” says Aneta Wierzynska, Senior Specialist on Programmatic Risk and Assurance at the Global Fund. “It’s by far the most nimble and innovative model for disease elimination possible, and we’re not afraid to ask the hard questions and try new approaches. That’s how we move needles.”

Moving the needle in the race to end serious transmissible diseases

 

Since its founding in 2002, the nonprofit has made strong inroads on its mission. Now, with COVID-19 added to its list, the Geneva-based nonprofit faces added challenges in its life-saving mission. The Global Fund wanted a flexible tool that it could use to build on its early successes and tackle the more nuanced aspects of disease spread. The organization focused on how funds are used after the principal recipients (PRs) receive them. A PR can be a government or a non-governmental agency, such as a non-governmental organization or a UN agency. The Global Fund found that understanding what happens to the funds after they’ve been disbursed by the PRs to the next layer—an ever-expanding pyramid of institutions charged with carrying out interventions—is key to getting the greatest possible value from that money.

Wierzynska’s role in the organization is to hold recipients of grant funds accountable for delivering the actual public health interventions that the Global Fund finances. And although she began her career as a fraud investigator, she finds that the best way to achieve accountability is by understanding the complex interplay public health agencies and the broad array of health service provider involved in delivering health interventions. Questions about who has responsibility for what, how implementors coordinate, and how they spend each portion of a grant as it passes through a PR’s sub-organizations are much more important in ensuring impact.

A picture is worth a thousand words, or in the case of the Global Fund—the web of organizations, and the flow of funds, medicines, diagnostics, epidemiological data, and decision-making that connects them. Before the Visio-based tool was available, the organization struggled to gather that information and present it in a way people could easily grasp. It could take weeks to produce a representation of the national health system and associated organizations that receive grant funds, but the image would be either too messy or incomplete, so no one would use it—time-pressed grant managers and other users found it difficult to grasp the non-standardized, complex diagrams. Wierzynska envisioned a simplified map of shapes indicating PRs and their downstream organizations, connected with color-coded arrows to indicate the flows of medicines, data, and supervision over funding. “After looking at masses of ready-made tools on one hand, and on the other interviewing several developers to create a bespoke solution, I was discouraged by the costs and complexities of both options,” says Wierzynska. She engaged with oneAssist, a Munich- and Berlin-based Microsoft Partner Network member specializing in Visio. “oneAssist understood our needs and used Visio to create my dream tool for tracking and showing all the information we need with mind-blowing functionality.”

"oneAssist understood our needs and used Visio to create my dream tool for tracking and showing all the information we need with mind-blowing functionality."

Aneta Wierzynska: Senior Specialist on Programmatic Risk and Assurance
The Global Fund

Gathering data under some of the most inhospitable conditions

When Senaj Lelic, Managing Director at oneAssist, met with Wierzynska to discuss the project, he immediately grasped the requirement. “The task itself was very simple,” he says. “They needed to document and model data in a visual way for a user community that are not data scientists, or possibly even all that experienced in entering data.” But he understood the quandary Wierzynska faced in her search for a viable tool. “To develop a tool like this without the core engine we have with Visio would have taken a year of full-time development at a six-figure cost,” he adds. “With the data-handling capabilities and graphical UI in Visio, we had the foundation we needed to develop the perfect tool for the Global Fund.”

Learning more about the places where the Global Fund would use the tool reinforced Lelic’s confidence in Visio. Many organizations that the Global Fund works with were able to use the tool immediately. “We’re not talking about people sitting in comfortable, air-conditioned offices with all the most modern technologies at their fingertips,” explains Lelic. “These are people constantly on the move in low-connectivity areas with possibly very old laptop devices. They don’t have the time or often the training to sift through spreadsheets and enter rows of data. But with Visio, we could make their task much easier with a graphical, drag-and-drop interface.” Wierzynska expands on just how significant that advantage is. “It took me only two hours to reproduce a funding map that it took me 24 hours to build on Excel,” she says.

"To develop a tool like this without the core engine we have with Visio would have taken a year of full-time development at a six-figure cost. With the data-handling capabilities and graphical UI in Visio, we had the foundation we needed to develop the perfect tool for the Global Fund."

Senaj Lelic: Managing Director
oneAssist

Recording and revealing crucial information with Visio shapes

For Global Fund managers, the Visio-based tool took grant management to a more strategic level. “The Visio experience marked the shift from a one-time, one-dimensional, manual snapshot of relationships, funding flows, and resources to a dynamic, real-time, multidimensional management tool for tailored decision-making,” says Mark Saafeld, Fund Portfolio Manager (Ghana) at the Global Fund. “Now, we use the context provided by the multiple layers of data on entities, geographies, flows, and results for more acute analysis, and it’s much easier to monitor and engage with stakeholders.” 

Like the organization itself, the tool is flexible, agile, and invaluable to all constituencies, not just Global Fund grant managers. “It’s not that we had the data and it was just a question of visualizing it,” explains Wierzynska. “In fact, it’s very difficult for officials all over the world to really understand the breadth and depth of everything they oversee. We use the Visio tool to collect and then show this invaluable information in a highly accessible way.” That data is critical not just to the countries involved, but to NGOs who can now see where grants supporting one initiative can be used to support another in tandem, rather than deploying two different teams working in parallel silos. That makes money go a lot further and helps build sustainable, resilient health systems.

"The Microsoft Visio experience marked the shift from a one-time, one-dimensional, manual snapshot of relationships, funding flows, and resources to a dynamic, real-time, multidimensional management tool for tailored decision-making."

Mark Saafeld: Fund Portfolio Manager (Ghana)
The Global Fund

Propelling the mission forward

Combining the strengths of multiple organizations is a key engagement modality for the Global Fund. It partners with many international organizations, including the World Bank, WHO, and the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP). In 2019, the Global Fund formalized that cooperation by creating the Coalition for Accountability, Transparency, and Anti-Corruption in Health (CATCH). “We’re developing smarter ways of supporting accountability and transparency in health,” says Wierzynska. “Our Visio-based tool is one of the innovations that will accelerate that goal.”

As they’ve shared the tool out around the world, Wierzynska and Lelic have become more concerned than ever about a growing digital divide between have and have-not countries. Lelic saw how hard some areas had to work to gather data. He was shocked at the disparity between his world and many of the places where aid workers and local community health staffers labor to fight disease. Old technology combined with spotty, if any, internet access make gathering data difficult. “There’s a much weaker IT infrastructure in many of the countries that we serve than I had ever imagined,” says Wierzynska. “We encourage our applicants to incorporate some funding for updated devices and software into our grants while still keeping the funding needed for the most essential preventative measures, like bed nets to protect people from malaria-bearing mosquitos.”

Ironically, the tool that is so useful in exposing the deepest issues can’t be used in every situation, when workers are restricted to outdated devices incapable of running modern software. “It’s like sending a Ferrari to someone in a place where there are no roads,” says Lelic. “It’s a highly capable tool, but they can’t use it. I’ve come to realize that much of the world doesn’t have the same level of technology that we take for granted.”

Nonetheless, the tool is showing results, and usage by other organizations is growing—multiplying the power of knowledge about the entire health funding system. “This was so different from any project we’d ever done before because it’s so mission-driven,” says Lelic. “Not only did we have the opportunity to create an easily usable tool based on very sophisticated processes expedited by Visio—this innovation really helped the Global Fund to see the impact of its work. And that is truly thrilling.”

"We’re developing smarter ways of supporting accountability and transparency in health. Our Visio-based tool is one of the innovations that will accelerate that goal."

Aneta Wierzynska: Senior Specialist on Programmatic Risk and Assurance
The Global Fund

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