Major Donors Pull Plug on the Global Fund

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria will not disperse any funds until 2014 due to cut backs from donor countries.  There will be no new money to overcome the three killer diseases. It is ironic that this announcement is made on World AIDS day, when the signs were good for a turning back of the progress of these diseases.

The World Health Organisation is reporting much improved access to HIV treatment has produced a fifteen percent cut in the number of new cases in the last ten years and a twenty-two percent decline in AIDS related mortality since 2006.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria

“The Global Fund is under mortal threat because of budget cuts approved by President Barack Obama and the congress. The Obama administration has pledged US$4 billion during 2011-13 to the Global Fund or 1,33 billion per year. Now it is reneging on its pledge,”

-Steven Lewis, director of AIDS Free World said on Monday

Is it complacency on the part of World governments in the face of such good news? Or is it economic necessity caused by the global cash crisis? Or could it be even more fundamental than this and be the latest evidence of evolution and natural selection in action on a global scale? Resources i.e. cash money, are scarce.

Competition for Money

There is competition internationally for money. The inherited genetic characteristic that wins out in these times is being rich and living in the English-speaking World. The ‘haves’ are snatching back their largesse towards the ‘have nots’ so that their gene pool will continue while AIDS, TB and malaria kill of the unfortunate poor.

It is certainly the only time in the Global Fund’s history that it has cut funding and stopped grants to life-preserving initiatives. Their rationale is that donors have failed to live up to their promises. They need $2 billion to meet all of the finance requests before them up until 2014. This money is the oxygen of HIV, TB and malaria prevention, therapy and cure in the Third World. Certainly it is a mortal wound in the body of the Millennium Development Goals for 2015.

The Fund accounts for eighty percent of the battle against TB, three-quarters of the money against malaria and fifty percent of the drive to eradicate HIV and AIDS.  The Fund has been the object of criticism when it reported financial misuse and corruption in the recipient countries and organisations.

Financial Control

It responded by setting up a high level independent commission to review its financial control processes. This commission proposed transforming the Fund from an emergency response organisation to a more sustained and sustainable aid program. The outcome of this approach would be to cut off and effectively kill numerous projects in developing countries at the cost of innumerable human lives.

The Burundi national TB effort is 100% funded by the Global fund and was due for renewal in 2012. No money will mean no inoculations and widespread disease and death. Other nations dependant to a greater or lesser extent on the money from the first World are Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Guyana to name but a few. The Fund is only the intermediary between the donors and the sick people in the poorest parts of the World.

[box type=”info”]To not live up to financial promises is morally reprehensible and also economic nonsense. It means that we are writing off all of the sunken costs so far, just at the point in the battle against the 3 diseases when the tide was turning in the favour of health and epidemic control.[/box]