FIT's endowment fund

Dear Friends,

As we close 2025, we are proud to share how FIT’s work in tuberculosis (TB) detection, care, and research continues to generate measurable impact 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 foundation that allows FIT to keep delivering lifesaving programs in the future.

Project Overview

FIT’s Endowment Fund is designed to create long-term financial stability for Freundeskreis für Internationale Tuberkulosehilfe (FIT), ensuring that tuberculosis (TB) programs can continue without interruption. While building this sustainable funding base, FIT continues to deliver large-scale TB screening, diagnosis, care, and innovative research that addresses both the medical and social realities of TB.

In 2025, FIT combined direct health services with a major new research initiative, showing how immediate impact and long-term solutions can go hand in hand.

Challenges

2025 was an exceptionally difficult year for FIT. The organization faced the sudden loss of major projects and funding streams. These changes disrupted operations, created financial uncertainty, and required painful internal adjustments, including staff reductions and the loss of valuable institutional experience.

At the same time, Viet Nam underwent a major government restructuring. Provinces were consolidated, ministries merged, and the district administrative level, which is central to TB service delivery, was removed. This caused shifts in partners, unclear roles, and disruptions to established coordination systems. FIT had to adapt quickly to a rapidly changing external environment while managing internal transitions.

Successes

Despite all the headwinds, we were able to record notable gains towards the end of the year. The Global Fund PPM Model 5 project has restarted and recently issued a formal acknowledgment of the contribution that our work has made to national TB care and prevention. Our Start4All study overcame major challenges to successfully contribute to global diagnostic guidelines. TB REACH projects like INTEGRATE and ELIMINATE have been accepted as case studies by WHO, and the DISPATCH project has received more money twice. The RTC project has brought a series of First’s to our organization: the first Human-Centered Design process, our first hybrid implementation trial with the UPLIFT study, the first successfully executed sticker campaign. Last but not least, we cannot overstate the importance of the US CDC overall that singlehandedly supported more than half the people in this room with its ECLIPSE project and even the forlorn pediatric TB project.

We have also engaged many new partners and expanded old friendships over the past year. New partners that included Seoul National University, the Technical University Munich and SYCP; and old friends from the Karolinska Institutet, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and VNP+. We hosted leadership from the Stop TB Partnership and befriended best-selling author and Vlogger John Green. We welcomed dignitaries from Global Affairs Canada and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and even a Baron of the UK’s House of Lords.

FIT’s Results and Impact

In 2025, FIT focused on maintaining essential TB services while continuing to contribute to the global scientific community and building capacity among Vietnamese communities and young professionals.

• TB detection and diagnosis: FIT-supported programs conducted 60,393 chest X-rays and 11,718 diagnostic tests, helping identify people with TB earlier and connect them to treatment quickly to detect 1,975 people with TB
• Our various AI and diagnostic as well as implementation and social science studies have contributed to 8 scientific publications and 10 abstracts in 2025
• We supported capacity building in Vietnam’s communities and youth by supporting 5 current and former PhD students and sending a dozen of our colleagues to master’s and PhD programs, two of whom have decided to return and support us.

Since we began our work, we have supported 2.2 million people screened by X-ray to enable free testing using advanced molecular diagnostics, leading to the detection of over 45,000 persons with TB – many of those among the most vulnerable in our society, from mountainous regions of Lai Chau and remote islands of Cu Lao Cham and soon Con Dao, to the destitute urban poor and economic migrants of Hanoi and Saigon to the marginalized persons living with HIV and underserved older persons, women, and children.

At the organizational level, the Endowment Fund strengthens FIT’s stability and resilience, helping ensure that essential TB programs and innovations can continue despite changing funding landscapes.

Looking Ahead

FIT will continue expanding access to TB screening and care while producing evidence from our various trials and studies to inform future TB programs. Building the Endowment Fund remains a priority, providing a stable foundation to sustain impact, support innovation, and reach vulnerable populations in the years ahead.

Thank you for supporting both immediate health impacts and long-term change in the fight against TB.

Links:

• Our website
• Follow us on Facebook
• Follow us on LinkedIn