Tuberculosis (TB) is both preventable and curable yet remains among the top ten causes of death globally. India has 27% of the total TB burden, the most deaths due to TB and the greatest number of people with Drug-Resistant TB (DR TB). With the Indian government committing to eliminate TB in India by 2025 - ten years ahead of the global targets - high level political commitment and increased resources for TB have energised national efforts in recent years. India is a signatory to the UN HLM declaration on TB and has set for itself the task of diagnosing and treating 11,900,000 TB patients, including 406,600 drug-resistant TB (DR TB) cases and 844,200 childhood TB cases, and initiating more than 7 million individuals on preventative therapy by 2022. As these deadlines draw closer, programmatic and community responses to TB need to innovate and accelerate to tackle persistent challenges.
The HLM declaration recognizes the role of communities and community-centered approaches as central to achieving these ambitious targets. This is echoed in the National Strategic Plan for TB for 2017-25 (NSP) for TB elimination and the Technical Operations Guidelines (TOG) that consider communities not as passive recipients of care but as active and motivated stakeholders in the nation’s response to TB.
This project is based on the understanding that a crucial but missing element in efforts to end TB is community initiative to shape and enable policy and service delivery environments that can mitigate stigma and ensure equitable access to quality prevention, detection and treatment of and for TB. Deploying inter-sectoral, gendered, individual and family-cantered behavioural, and management approaches, the project will position the community as ALLIES to the program, enhancing the efficient delivery of TB services in ways that speak to individual needs - particularly of members of key affected and marginalized populations - across the care cascade.