FIT's endowment fund

Dear Friends,

We are proud to share how FIT’s work in streamlining tuberculosis (TB) care and support continues to generate measurable impact, all while we build long-term sustainability through the establishment of our endowment fund.

Your support is helping people affected by TB today, strengthening the financial and digital foundations that allow FIT to keep delivering lifesaving programs in the future.

Project Overview

FIT’s Endowment Fund is designed to create long-term financial stability for Friends for International TB Relief (FIT), ensuring that TB projects can continue without interruption. While building this sustainable funding base to reach our $100,000 USD goal, FIT continues to deliver impactful interventions to achieve the targets set at the 2023 UN High-Level Meeting on TB.

A highlight of our work in 2026 has been building the digital infrastructure needed to streamline the delivery of financial support to vulnerable people with TB. As part of the Re-imagining TB Care (RTC) initiative, FIT has championed the digitization of The Patient Support Foundation to End TB (PASTB), a charity fund founded in 2018 by the National Lung Hospital, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Since its inception, PASTB has domestically mobilized and distributed over 12.6 billion VND (~$478,096 USD) to protect people with TB from catastrophic health costs. The fund provides essential support packages to both uninsured people with TB and under-insured individuals needing social health insurance reimbursement via two core pathways:

• Inpatient Support: Cash transfers of either 1,000,000 VND or 2,000,000 VND, dynamically assigned based on the location of the TB disease.
• Outpatient Support: Cash transfers of up to 2,000,000 VND, strategically delivered during the critical 3rd month of treatment and upon successful completion of the full regimen.

Challenges

Operating a national fund of this scale without dedicated digital infrastructure presents massive systemic hurdles. For years, PASTB had to rely entirely on slow, paper-based application processes to function.

This manual setup created significant institutional bottlenecks: it elongated the time it took for emergency cash to reach people with TB, heavily strained administrative staff, and left the fund highly vulnerable to shifting regulatory terrains and unpredictable, time-limited external funding cycles. Relying on manual workflows meant that any delay in paperwork directly impacted a person with TB's ability to stay on their treatment regimen.

Successes

Despite these structural challenges, FIT successfully designed, evaluated, and launched a robust digital infrastructure for the PASTB website following People-Centered Design principles. This achievement was realized through a highly collaborative, iterative workflow:

• Ideation and Development: FIT, PASTB, and the National Tuberculosis Program (NTP) co-designed the platform, creating a beta version that successfully digitized paper-based workflows.
• Pilot 1 & Refinement: We deployed the beta version in 4 pilot provinces and conducted initial field interviews to refine the portal based on real user feedback.
• Assessment & Pilot 2: Evaluation findings were shared directly with the NTP and PASTB to upgrade digital procedures. The modified website was then scaled up and piloted across 10 provinces, supported by a second round of evaluation interviews.
• Handover: After analyzing the final round of user feedback and optimizing the system, FIT established a fully stable website and successfully transferred 100% of the digital operations over to PASTB for long-term national ownership.

FIT’s Results and Impact

The deployment of the new digital platform has drastically improved efficiency and provided immediate, tangible relief to people undergoing TB treatment:

• 554 applications successfully processed through the new digital pipeline.
• 449,593,500 VND (~$17,059 USD) in critical financial support safely delivered to people fighting TB.
• A 28% reduction in the median days required to deliver financial support to people with TB over the year, getting resources to families faster when they need it most.

At the organizational level, establishing the Endowment Fund works hand-in-hand with these digital milestones. Consistent investment returns will reduce FIT's reliance on short-term funding, enabling us to scale up outreach to vulnerable populations, focus on core operational excellence, and navigate shifting health landscapes without interruption.

Looking Ahead

FIT remains deeply committed to expanding the reach of the PASTB website and ensuring that digital innovations translate directly to better treatment outcomes. Moving forward, building the Endowment Fund to our $100,000 USD target will provide the financial resilience required to sustain these digital advancements, protect our operations against funding cliffs, and ensure that no people with TB is left behind due to financial or technological barriers.

Thank you for supporting both immediate digital transformation and long-term financial stability in the global fight against TB.

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