Don’t stop now: how underfunding the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria impacts on the HIV response

In November 2011, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund) announced that its next scheduled funding round was cancelled. This report draws on recently collected field data from numerous countries where the International HIV/AIDS Alliance operates to explain why AIDS funding crisis requires urgent action.

The paper notes that Bangladesh, Bolivia, South Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe were all, until the funding crisis, making strong progress towards reducing HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths. However, the country impact studies document the many ways in which these countries’ HIV responses are now endangered.

Conclusions are as follows:

• the scale-up of the worldwide HIV response will be seriously affected and important existing services will be reduced or eliminated in the absence of urgent measures
• if the global community is to prevent this enormous setback threatening the health and lives of millions of people then swift and decisive action is imperative
• the Global Fund is the best mechanism the world has for realising the possibility of a world without AIDS but can only do so with sufficient investment
  

Policy recommendations are that:

• donors and other stakeholders must act very quickly to maintain and scale up critical HIV services so that lives are not put at risk 
• particularly, they must ensure that interventions with the highest impact on the epidemic are supported
• national governments must increase investment in their own HIV responses and in the implementation of national AIDS strategies