Reaction to Bush Proposal on AIDS

"You gain strength, experience and confidence by every experience where you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you cannot do.
–Eleanor Roosevelt

REACTION TO BUSH PROPOSAL ON AIDS

In his State of the Union address on 28 January, US President George Bush made a dramatic commitment to provide $10 billion of new funding for AIDS over the years 2004-2008, in addition to the $5 billion of expenditure already projected for that period. While world wide reaction was enthusiastic, this story appearing in Business Day (February 5, 2003) in South Africa offers some concerns:

"President George Bush made a breakthrough in last week's state of the union address by pledging $15bn of US support over the next five years to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. The US commitment to increase its spending by $10bn is the first time that an appropriate level of financial resources has been put into the battle by either the US or Europe. But disappointment comes in the fine print. The US, as is its wont these days, has decided to go it alone. The new programme is designed to be run by US agencies rather than going through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, the international initiative that is best placed by far to achieve the global goals of curbing the three pandemic diseases. Of the new US funding, only $1bn over five years is to go through the Global Fund. It is now up to European nations to ensure success in the scaled-up campaign against the killer diseases. They could do so by matching the US financial commitment, and pulling the US back into the fold within the Global Fund.

"As a recent convert to the war on AIDS, the US administration has latched on to a simplistic vision of what to do, based on the example of a single country -- Uganda. It knows little of the measures in place in different parts of the world, and has not recognised that each country needs to shape the best local response. It is here that the Global Fund plays an important role. The fund is organised as a consortium of donors and recipient countries, civil society and business. It is set up to encourage rigorous and sensible plans that meet local needs. Specifically, the fund invites the leading stakeholders within each recipient country to prepare a unified national plan. The fund builds on an important recent insight of the European donor agencies, that support is most effective when the donors pool their resources to support a single coherent strategy -- known as a sector-wide approach. Otherwise, each country has to grapple with 20 or more separate aid agencies, each with its own quirks, politics, reporting requirements and tied aid. The US plan would undermine a sector-wide approach by pushing AIDS control back to a scramble of individual donor projects."

To read this entire story as well as related stories, go to:
www.aidspan.org/gfo/archives/newsletter/issue7.htm