The World Health Organisation (WHO) is releasing new guidance to support national strategic planning for tuberculosis (TB) response. The guidance encourages the use of a people-centric focus in the development of a national TB strategic plan (NSP). It highlights the importance of government stewardship and ownership, promotes alignment with national health strategy and other health programmes and emphasises multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral engagement as one of the key steps for multisectoral accountability for TB.

The guidance for national strategic planning for tuberculosis was developed to better align with global commitments and the latest developments in TB and public health and builds on lessons learned from using the 2015 toolkit. The document will be complemented by the guidance for conducting reviews of TB programmes, which will be published by the end of this year.

The guidance is intended for use in developing standalone TB strategic plans, or in developing TB interventions as part of multi-disease or national health sector plans. It describes good practices and steps for developing a TB NSP in line with WHO’s End TB Strategy, and the proposed structure and components of the TB NSP.

A webinar to present the new guidance and share perspectives and experiences from countries, civil society and partners will be held on September 6, 2022.