The Global Fund Secretariat in Geneva has approved the Round 9 Lesotho country proposal whose budget was $30,796,000 (M230,970,000) for the period of five years focuses mainly on supporting Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) education.

The main objective of Round 9 was to request financial support to assist the Government of Lesotho to increase access to quality education for OVC in and out of school, increase capacity for OVC monitoring and evaluation programme as well as to sensitize the public about Child Welfare Bill after its enactment.

Out of the proposed budget of $30,796,000, the other portion $27,418,085 will be used for OVC school fees, toiletries, uniform and life skills while $707,834 will be used for research and M&E and $680,620 to publicize the Child Protection and Welfare Act (after the anactment).

The proposal of OVC support emanated from HIV and AIDS gap analysis which reveals significant gap in OVC support national wide.

This proposal is therefore intended to support the scale-up of R7 grant activities especially those which were discovered to have been under budgeted.

The phase one of this grant which is scheduled to take two years will be signed toward end of 2010 amounting to $10,356,112 (77,670,840) and will be refer to as R9 OVC Grant Phase I.

The Lesotho Red Cross Society (LRCS) renovated 39 and constructed 11 new two rooms houses for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) at Mohlakeng council in Maseru district.  The house renovation project is supported under Global Fund Round 7 HIV/AIDS grant as part of essential services for OVC Grant Phase I.

 project which include shelter.