Unitaid is working to achieve maximum possible health impact through investments aimed at people most exposed to disease and in greatest need.

A primary goal of Unitaid is to identify how it can best contribute to the global response with carefully targeted investments that help, for example, to overcome specific obstacles such as high prices for medicines that show promise.

These “areas for intervention”, pinpointing where Unitaid’s investments can most effectively help advance global health goals to end HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, are the building blocks of our work. They also enable our partners to achieve more with scarce resources.

The choice of each area in which Unitaid intervenes is grounded in a rigorous analysis of the context surrounding each disease, contained in a coherent disease narrative.

The narratives review each disease, including the overall disease burden; the strategies that are being pursued in order to meet global health goals; actions of partners in pursuing those goals; the extent of any gaps in the response; and the opportunities for intervention by Unitaid.

They also frame, provide context for and establish a scale of priorities for Unitaid’s interventions and articulate potential opportunities to complement partner activities and support the pursuit of global health goals.

On the basis of the disease narrative and following consultation with its partners, Unitaid maps out each of the areas in which it can intervene and proposes them to the Board for validation. Unitaid then launches calls for proposal from potential grantees after identifying specific interventions within each area.

A number of common challenges have been identified in several disease-specific narratives; such cross-cutting challenges may benefit from common solutions. These are identified through approach documents – the first example of which is Unitaid’s intellectual property approach

• Disease Narrative for hepatitis C (February 2020)
• Disease Narrative for HIV/HCV co-infection (Updated: November 2015)
• Disease Narrative for Malaria (Updated: December 2019)
• Methodology for developing strategic narratives (November 2015)
• Disease Narrative for HIV (Updated: November 2019)
• Disease Narrative for Tuberculosis (Updated: December 2019)
• Thematic Narrative for Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH) (June 2016)
• Unitaid’s approach to intellectual property (December 2016)