Community-led monitoring (CLM) is an accountability mechanism designed to identify barriers to healthcare access, turn community data into advocacy ‘asks’, and engage with duty-bearers in government, donor organizations, and in the health system to rectify these barriers.
The CLM model was developed several decades ago and has been a core part of community advocacy throughout the response to HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. In its current form, the CLM model became a key donor priority in 2018, when PEPFAR, the United States government’s bilateral HIV
program, began funding and requiring all partner countries to implement a CLM program. This guidance led to a rapid proliferation of CLM programs worldwide and the implementation of the approach across several contexts. Shortly after PEPFAR’s adoption of the model, the Global Fund began its own funding of CLM, and today has active programs in more than half of the countries it supports.