Aids fund ahead of targets
24 August 2005
Three years after its creation, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria is proving to be a key driver behind the fight against the three pandemics worldwide.
The Global Fund is a global public-private partnership dedicated to attracting and disbursing additional resources to prevent and treat HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.
It works in close collaboration with other multilateral organisations to supplement existing efforts dealing with the three diseases.
Despite an average age of only 15 months, Global Fund-financed programmes support 220 000 people on HIV/Aids treatment and have provided treatment for 600 000 patients with TB and 1.1-million patients with malaria.
These results are ahead of mid-year targets for 2005.
'Gratifying'
The Global Fund currently contributes a fifth of all external resources worldwide to fight HIV/Aids, two-thirds of all external resources
against TB and well over half against malaria.
"It is extremely gratifying to see that our grant portfolio is doing well - even better than expected," said Carol Jacobs, chair of the Global Fund's board.
"It indicates that the Global Fund's financing structure, which lets countries design and implement their own programmes and which rewards good performance, works even in countries that traditionally are not able to use external financing well."
"We are financing programmes to most of the world's poorest countries, and the health sector traditionally receives the smallest part of these countries' budgets," said Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund.
"Starved of educated personnel and infrastructure, these countries are rarely well prepared to turn large new resources into results quickly.
"The fact that these programmes have achieved substantial results after such a short time is a tribute to the tremendous efforts made by thousands
of health workers operating under extremely difficult conditions," said Feachem.
Exceeding targets
An analysis of the Global Fund's grant portfolio shows that of the 74 grants that have reached 18 months of age, 80 percent have met or exceeded targets and that taken as a whole, the 74 grants have exceed all targets except those for the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs).
The Fund grants enable countries to scale up their fight against the three diseases in a sustainable way by strengthening health systems and paying for drugs, diagnostics, mosquito nets and other commodities.
It has allocated US$3.1-billion for the first two years of 316 programmes in 127 countries with a total five-year value of $8.1-billion.
Of the $3.1-billion committed over the first two years, 56 percent goes to fight HIV/Aids, while 13 percent goes to fight TB and 31 percent to malaria. Sixty percent is spent in sub-Saharan Africa.
A total of $1.4-billion has been disbursed to programmes so far.
Expenditure targets for Global Fund grants are 49 percent for drugs and related supplies, 20 percent for human resources, 13 percent for physical infrastructure, six percent for monitoring and evaluation, seven percent for administration and five percent for other purposes.
A separate analysis of grants to "fragile" states (defined as states that "cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of [their] people, including the poor") shows that grants to such states perform only marginally less well than grants to other low and middle-income countries.
Steady improvement
While the latest progress report points to a steady improvement in results and a persistent trend of a high-performing grant portfolio, it stresses the Fund needs to sharply increase the rate of programme acceleration in the next four years if it is to achieve its five-year
targets.
Annual targets have been set - based on grant agreements - for the scaling up of Global Fund-supported grant activities in order to reach 1.6 million people with ARV treatment for HIV/Aids and 3.5-million people with TB treatment, and to distribute or re-treat 108 million ITNs to protect families from malaria over the five-year lifespan of all grants approved to date.
If these targets are reached, this will increase global coverage two or more times from current levels.
Source: BuaNews
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