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Capacity building sector specific

International AIDS assistance: 'new' money?

Increased spending on HIV and AIDS has not come at the expense of funding for other areas

Authors: E. Lief; J. Antonio Izazola-Lice
Publisher: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, 2006

Full text of document

Produced as a background paper to inform the conference, ‘Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership on HIV and AIDS’, this issue brief presents a preliminary analysis of HIV and AIDS financing in developing countries.

Drawing on newly-available data for 13 representative countries, it finds that in all but one of the 13 countries analysed, increases in funding for HIV and AIDS programmes were obtained, not by diverting funds from other programmes, but from additional international and domestic spending:

  • increases in international HIV and AIDS assistance did not generally come at the expense of sustained assistance funding for other sectors; all but one country (Indonesia) of the 13 countries examined had experienced significant growth in total international economic assistance
  • all 13 countries spent more of their own money on HIV/AIDS, and all boosted their own overall public spending by amounts more than equivalent to their HIV and AIDS increases

It is unclear, however, whether needs for financing growth in some specific health sub-sectors may have been crowded out by demands related to HIV and AIDS and other infectious diseases.

The report concludes with the observation that innovation in HIV and AIDS financing remains the exception rather than the rule. Most international HIV and AIDS assistance in the developing world still takes the form of traditional grants, as a consequence competing for grant funding with other demands in other sectors. It suggests that recent alternatives, such as the US-supported Advance Market Commitment, the UK-proposed International Finance Facility and the French-enacted airline ticket tax, represent significant experiments in largely-unexplored territory, which the international community must expand into if the unprecedented financing demands driven by HIV and AIDS are to be met.