Strengthening Laboratory Capacity and Quality for HIV Diagnosis, Care, Treatment, and Monitoring in Malawi under the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

The Award Ceiling for Year 1 is 0 (none). CDC anticipates an Approximate Total Fiscal Year Funding amount of $8,375,000 for Year 1, subject to the availability of funds.As Malawi strives to reach HIV epidemic control, there is a need to improve and sustain achievements in the national laboratory systems. Technical assistance (TA) to the Ministry of Health (MOH) will ensure universal diagnostics access and address public health system gaps. For sustainability, MOH's public health laboratory capabilities will be strengthened for governance and ownership, National Reference Laboratories (NRL) capacity will be built for surveillance and outbreak responses, and the HIV laboratory program will be integrated into broader disease areas. Priorities include scaling up patient-centered approaches to identify and address challenges of low viral load coverage (VLC) and suppression in different age groups and populations, point of care testing (POCT) laboratories for integrated multi-disease tests, and rapid testing continuous quality improvement (RTCQI) to achieve national certification. Other priorities include improving access for advanced HIV disease (AHD) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) tests, conducting regular diagnostic network optimization to ensure efficiencies and testing accessibility, increasing utilization of high throughput instruments in conventional molecular laboratories to improve VLC, improving biosafety and waste management, preparing additional laboratories for International Organization for Standardization (ISO) accreditations, and extending the external quality assessment (EQA) program to multiple testing parameters.