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The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy. investigated, including male circumcision, microbicides, and vaccines. These new approaches will change the appropriate mix and costs of prevention services in unforeseen ways. Without greater flexibility, the ability of the U.S. Global AIDS Initiative to lead the way in utilizing such new techniques when proven effective will be greatly reduced. Recommendation 3-3: Although they may have been helpful initially in ensuring a balance of attention to activities within the four categories of prevention, treatment, care, and orphans and vulnerable children, the Committee concludes that rigid congressional budget allocations among categories, and even more so within categories, have also limited PEPFAR’s ability to tailor its activities in each country to the local epidemic and to coordinate with the level of activities in the countries’ national plans. Congress should remove the budget allocations and replace them with more appropriate mechanisms that ensure accountability for results from Country Teams to the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and to Congress. These mechanisms should also ensure that spending is directly linked to and commensurate with necessary efforts to achieve both country and overall performance targets for prevention, treatment, care, and orphans and other vulnerable children. TARGETSSome of the indicators being collected by PEPFAR do not yet provide appropriate information on the progress being made toward the ultimate goal of controlling the epidemic. As is appropriate for a program this early in its implementation, most results reported to date are for targets that can be measured in the short term; thus they reveal more about the process of implementation than the impact of the program. PEPFAR plans to measure more meaningful mid- and long-term results, and the program is supporting countries in developing the measures and skills needed to evaluate the impact of initiatives at the country level. One issue related to targets concerns requiring that results be specifically and uniquely attributed to the U.S. initiative. Such a requirement creates disincentives for international coordination among donors and harmonization at the country level, and can work against the use of U.S. funds to leverage other donors’ interests in a particular area. The most important result is impact on a country’s epidemic, and that impact can best be attributed to collective actions taken in partnership with all donors and, most critically, the host country. PEPFAR would do well to consider a step taken by some other large donors: evaluating Country Teams on how well they cooperate with the partner government and the donor group as a whole and how effective they are at leveraging a successful package of services.
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