Reaction to the Global Fund's decisions on Round 11 and grant renewals

The following reactions from key organisations to the Global Fund’s decision to do away with Round 11 were highlighted in a GFO article.

Health GAP

“The funding window that was cancelled today would have enabled scale-up of lifesaving treatment and prevention services for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria to millions of poor people in developing countries.

“What is particularly scandalous about this cancellation is that donors didn’t have to do it. The amounts of money we’re talking about are barely a rounding error in donor budgets.”

MSF

“There’s a shocking incongruence between both the new HIV science and political promises on one hand, and the funding reality that is now hitting the ground on the other. Donors are really pulling the rug out from under people living with HIV/AIDS at precisely the time when we need to move full steam ahead and get life-saving treatment to more people.”

ITPC

“The lack of political and financial commitment to the AIDS response is deeply worrisome. The millions of people living with and fighting against these deadly diseases will pay an enormous price. Rather than building on the new evidence that AIDS treatment saves lives and prevents new infections, and scaling up treatment programs to try to end this epidemic, donor governments are now implicitly supporting a policy of triage, determining who lives and who dies.”

“The shortfall in funding for the Global Fund is an insignificant amount in comparison to the bank bailouts made by the U.S. and European governments, or even the bonuses set aside for Goldman Sachs executives this year.”

International HIV/AIDS Alliance

“The news that the Global Fund Board had decided to cancel Round 11 has devastated civil society organisations across the Alliance global partnership. We should not be shy in saying this decision and the financial situation of the Global Fund at this moment is a disaster for Africa.”

“International solidarity, perhaps the most precious resource needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals, is in dangerously short supply. A few days ago at the Fund’s meeting, tensions were high among representatives of implementer countries: They were fighting to be granted the dubious recognition of being the poorest among the poor in order to guarantee their access to the few resources still left. During these discussions, we tend to forget that people have a right to live regardless of where they were born.”

Coalition of AIDS activist organisations in Southern Africa

“It is a disaster for Zimbabwe as a country. More than 86,000 people will be left without treatment and about 5,000 children will be affected. The situation in Swaziland, where approximately 26 percent of the population of 1.2 million live with HIV, is dire, with stockpiles of ARVs already dwindling”.

The Guardian

The Global Fund has been “staring at a financial black hole ever since its big replenishment meeting in New York a year ago failed to deliver the sums it hoped for. It wanted $20bn. It got $11.7bn. That was in spite of exhortations to donors to pledge money from the U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, who warned that the stakes were high and that lives would be lost if pressure on the big killer diseases was not maintained.”

New Statesman

“it reveals just how precarious daily life has become for the global 99 per cent: those whose very health, as much as their job security, is pegged to the rise and fall of the money markets. The politics of austerity we are going through has not even begun to be properly costed. This is the real lesson of the Global Fund’s demise and it will require much more than simply getting wealthy donors back on board to address it.”

Source: Adapted from Global Fund Observer (GFO) Issue 169: 5 Dec. 2011.