April 27, 2007
The Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, one of the world's biggest sources of funding against the diseases, said Friday that it will need to triple in size by 2010. The Fund's board agreed at a meeting to raise its spending target to six billion dollars a year to meet projected demand, it said in a statement. Further increased demand for financing from developing countries could potentially raise the figure to eight billion dollars, it added.
Kazatchkine dubbed the decision by representatives of donor and recipient governments, aid groups, and the private sector -- notably the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation -- "a vote of confidence" in the Fund's work. "Programmes we support are currently saving 3,000 lives per day," he said. "The increase in funding will allow the world to do much, much more, to reach G8 and UN goals like providing AIDS treatment to all who need it, having every African child sleep under a bed net, and cutting the death toll of TB in half," he added. The Global Fund has repeatedly called on donors to dig deeper into their pockets to help meet its goals. "We need more finance, much more finance, and we need reliable and predictable finance," the then executive director, Richard Feachem, said last August.
The Global Fund was created in January 2002 by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to channel new money into local projects in poor nations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation run by the US software billionaire and his wife kickstarted the Fund with an initial 100 million dollar donation, followed by 50 million in 2004 and a pledge of a further 500 million last year. The board recognised that the expansion would require significant additional contributions from new and existing public and private sources, as well as "innovative" financing mechanisms.
