Health Policy, Financing Advocacy & Mobilization Consultant

Introduction

ITPC Global was founded in 2003 in Cape Town by 125 HIV activists from 65 countries, fighting for access to life-saving medicine. Evolving into a Global Activist Network, it championed community-driven advocacy beyond HIV and TB, challenging systemic health inequities.

Background

ITPC Global consists of three strategic pillars: Build Resilient Communities (BRC), Watch What Matters (WWM), Make Medicines Affordable (MMA). Build Resilient Communities aims to use treatment education to empower people living with HIV and their allies with information about HIV treatment and access issues. People living with HIV and their allies can use our resources to decide what to fight for, why to fight for it, and how to fight for it. By capacitating communities and treatment activists, they are able to work on issues that affect their health. The major goal of this strategy is to ensure recipients of care and communities remain at the center of all advocacy that is relevant to them. This strategy approach entails equipping communities with the knowledge, skills, tools as well as resources to carry out national and regional-level advocacy. This can take the form of training-of-trainer educational workshops, demand generation campaigns, and disbursement of small grants to support advocacy.

About the RFP

The global HIV and TB responses are being severely disrupted following the abrupt 2025 U.S. foreign aid cuts and parallel reductions from other donors. This has led to major program terminations, reduced access to HIV prevention services (including PrEP and CAB-LA), weakened health systems, and shrinking civic space across Southern Africa. Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are experiencing acute service disruptions, financing gaps, and instability in national HIV policy implementation.

ITPC’s Community Monitoring and Engagement for Transformation (COMET) project is a strategic response to this crisis.

Component 2 of this program focuses on:

• • Generating CLM evidence to inform national policy and financing shifts,
  • Strengthening civil society engagement in national HIV decision-making,
  • Tracking budgets, prevention policies, and policy commitments,
  • Using community data to influence domestic resource mobilization and priority-setting at national and regional level.

To support this work, ITPC seeks to engage an expert consultant to provide high-level technical, analytical, and facilitation support to Component 2 implementation across Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

The Health Policy & Financing Advocacy and Mobilization Consultant will play a multi-functional role providing support across the Community Engagement Monitoring for Transformation (COMET) project, broader community engagement, advocacy and mobilisation efforts, and generate community-led evidence to drive policy and financing in country, but also at the regional level.

Purpose of the Consultancy

This RFP invites experienced consultants to:

• Support communities to generate and leverage CLM data to strengthen advocacy for near-term HIV prevention policy and financing allocations
• Expand and adapt the CLM model to build the evidence base to monitor shifts and influence HIV prevention policy and financing in the rapidly shifting landscape
• Mobilize communities to influence HIV prevention policy and financing through coordinated advocacy by:
  • Strengthening community networks for financing and prevention advocacy
  • Facilitating strategic engagement between communities, policymakers and funders
• Promote CLM as a strategic tool for policy accountability
• Use an adaptive approach to expand influence, strengthen cross-sector accountability, align policies to increase sustainable financing
• Generate and disseminate policy and financing evidence from Data
• Provide technical support for national advocacy across country – partners
• Support HIV and CLM in non-traditional, cross-sector policy spaces
• Support CLM and HIV prevention within broader health policy spaces
• Promote South–South learning and strategic alignment
• Support ad-hoc activities across country – partners region
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders, including government agencies, technical partners, NGOs, community leaders and private sector partners.
• Facilitate communication and collaboration among stakeholders to support mutual objectives, representation and advocacy in global, regional and broader African meetings. Including preparation and delivery of reports to stakeholders.
• Oversee the delivery of the team on all strategic, project and day-to-day activities.
• Organize and facilitate meetings at global, regional and national levels.
• Manage the performance of all direct reports.

Eligibility Criteria

Applicants must:

• • Master’s degree in public health or related field with minimum 10 years’ experience working in an African context, non-profit, philanthropic sector or related field.
  • Extensive experience on policy, budgeting and financing across HIV and other disease areas
  • Demonstratable experience working across complex multi-country projects with organisations of various levels (grassroots, community-based, NGOs, government, academic institutions, etc.) including familiarity with HV landscape in African regions and continent.
  • Proven experience building the capacity of grassroots, community-based and NGOs to carry out community-led interventions, including but not limited to community-led monitoring, community-led research and advocacy.
  • Outstanding interpersonal skills, demonstrating high levels of personal integrity and professional credibility across populations.
  • Excellent leadership and people management skills, and comfort working collaboratively in-person and virtually (using Zoom, Skype and other tools).
  • Intuitive balance between macro and micro perspective when implementing a project (Strong attention to detail in the context of the bigger picture)
  • Ability to develop innovative solutions under resource-constrained settings with high levels of uncertainty.
  • Strong written and oral communication (including presentation) skills in English

English