In context when countries in the UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia (ROSA) were developing applications for CCEOP to Gavi, the Immunization Supply Chain Management (iSC) Team in the Immunization Unit, NYHQ, in close collaboration with UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia (ROSA) and UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office (EAPRO), organized  a workshop on Cold Chain Equipment Optimization Platform (CCEOP): Peer review of country documents accompanying the Gavi CCEOP submission.

The workshop took place in Kathmandou, Nepal from 10 – 15 July, 2017 with the participation of 20 representatives of the Ministries of Health (MoH) and UNICEF Country Offices from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.

The overall objective of this workshop was to support Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands developing their application to the CCEOP (September 2017 round).

Specifically, the iSC team and the countries worked together to:

• Review the guidelines and instructions for submission to the platform;
• Review each required document, including the Cold Chain Equipment Inventory Analysis Tool (Peer Review);
• Exchange on compliance with Gavi guidelines;
• Make amendments and corrections and verify the consistency of the documents and the activities in the HSS;
• Provide guidance for the finalization of documents and submission;
• Ensure that CCEOP co-investment obligations are taken into account and sources of funding well identified;
• Prepare for each country a timetable of activities up to the submission date (September for pre-review and November for IRC).
• Review of feedback from IRC members on Afghanistan & Nepal applications.

CCEOP application process was introduced to participants in order provide an overall concepts on the CCEOP application and steps to apply to this platform. Group work discussed and worked together on the submission guidelines. From this session, the groups shared with each other the key messages and information of the guidelines. Like a puzzle, the participants assembled the different pieces together to gain the knowledge of the overall CCEOP guidelines.

Based on the knowledge gained from the day 1, the team and the participant countries review their available mandatory documents before coming into the proposal writing process.

The team believed that the five countries would have strong proposals to submit to Gavi this round.

Technical support has continued to be provided by the facilitators after the workshops.