Several programs of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are threatened with collapse due to recipient governments' failure to spend the fund's money. In response, the U.S. global AIDS program has offered to help save the initiatives.

The potential assistance was discussed this week in Ethiopia at the second annual meeting of field workers from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

"If donors think that a Global Fund staff of 150 people in Geneva will monitor programs around the world, we will fail. We need a different model," with AIDS specialists in several countries helping Global Fund program oversight, said W. Brad Herbert, the Global Fund's chief of operations.

U.S. AIDS workers, troubled by the prospect of Global Fund programs failing, wondered just how a partnership between PEPFAR and the Global Fund would work. Challenges include the lack of an international drug purchasing plan, leading to medicine shortages in some countries in the last year.

While U.S. global AIDS coordinators are still reviewing what such coordination could entail, officials at the meeting specifically mentioned Global Fund programs in Tanzania and Kenya as having difficulties. In both countries, the governments have spent only fractions of the tens of millions of AIDS dollars allocated to them.

The spirit of cooperation can be traced to the "Three Ones" agreement made a year ago among PEPFAR, the Global Fund and the UN's World Health Organization and UNAIDS. That accord called for each country to develop one national policy, one coordinating body, and one monitoring system.

PEPFAR successes presented at the conference include a 300 percent increase in AIDS treatment in Kenya in the last year; a new cellphone text message-based record-keeping program in Rwanda; and a 94 percent acceptance rate among people asked to take HIV tests in a door-to-door Uganda program.

Back to other news for May 27, 2005

Search the Newsroom archive