Key achievements in 2023 included:

• Following comprehensive insight gathering and donor landscape analysis, we were pleased to have successfully launched our new strategy and restructured our team towards its delivery. Feedback from partners is that the strategy is clear and easy to communicate.
• Our resource mobilisation efforts were greatly enhanced by a number of critical ingredients:
  - the availability of an ambitious, compelling, specific, and costed ask for the ‘Africa Free Initiative’ (Reaching the Last Mile Forum / RLMF 2.0);
  - good data and country-by-country costings that enabled us to tailor pitches;
  - a high-level moment for commitments;
  - the involvement and financial commitments of key principals, a powerful lever for bringing others on board;
  - support of African leaders including Heads of State.
• These key ingredients allowed us to go to donors and countries with tailored and specific asks, something that has been a barrier to resource mobilisation for NTDs in the past.
• We were able to see the results of this clarity of ask, through our work with Tanzania and Sierra Leone standing shoulder-to-shoulder amongst donors to announce domestic commitments at the Reaching the Last Mile Forum (RLMF). This is the first time that Heads of State from affected countries have taken to the stage to announce specific financial commitments for NTDs.
• Uniting facilitated US$112m worth of stage announcements at RLMF, including commitments Uniting led in securing as well as those via our support to national level coalitions. In addition, we promoted and amplified the asks for others, providing additional information that enabled these partners to come on board. We also worked with AUDA-NEPAD on a US$20m bid to the African Development Bank (AfDB) for DRC, Burundi, and São Tomé and Principe.
• We launched the Kigali Declaration Commitment Tracker at World NTD Day 2023 and we invite partners to help us keep it updated.
• We celebrated all the disease elimination successes as they were announced by WHO. Of note was the elimination of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in Bangladesh, the first country in the world to be validated by WHO for eliminating VL. Uniting was pleased with the opportunity to join WHO in recognising Bangladesh at the SEARO Regional Meeting to which Uniting was invited. We also celebrated the elimination of countries in the ECOWAS region with an awards ceremony at a Heads of State Meeting where three Heads of State participated in the awards, alongside the President of ECOWAS.

Read more in the full report available to download above.