HEALTH: UN Seeks More Support for Global AIDS Fund

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 8 2001 (IPS) - UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s ambitious 10 billion-dollar Global AIDS and Health Fund is growing at a painfully slow pace – with the latest contribution of a million dollars trickling in from the corporate sector.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, the World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general, welcomed the pledge of support from by Credit Suisse and its subsidiary Winterthur Insurance and added Friday that she hoped industrial nations would follow suit.

The global fund is primarily aimed at controlling AIDS but it will also be deployed to fight tuberculosis and malaria. Annan issued an urgent call for contributions last month.

The United States has pledged 200 million dollars and France, 125 million dollars. Credit Suisse’s contribution brought the total to 326 million dollars – leaving a shortfall of more than 9.6 billion dollars.

According to Julia Celeves, senior policy officer at UNAIDS, the UN agency fighting the disease, only about 1.8 billion dollars is being spent annually on AIDS efforts worldwide, compared to the new fund’s 10-billion-dollar estimate of global needs.

“This Fund was not about creaming off resources from existing development projects but was about creating additional funds to attack three major diseases,” Celeves said.

Annan said he remains confident that the proposed fund will be up and running by the time the 189-member UN General Assembly holds a Special Session on AIDS June 25-27.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said the Secretary-General is personally involved in finalising details of the fund, which he first proposed last April.

“The Secretary-General expects the banking facility to be in place by then so that those attending the session, not just governments but non-governmental organisations, private corporations and individuals, would know where to deposit their cheques,” Eckhard said.

The Special Session, which more than 20 heads of state are expected to attend, will adopt the first global action plan to fight AIDS.

Annan has specifically described the fund as an international, not a UN, effort to be administered by its own governing board.

At the conclusion of a two-day consultation on the proposed fund, WHO Executive Director David Nabarro told reporters in Geneva last week that there was talk of a new secretariat to administer the effort.

“At this point, nobody was bidding for the secretariat,” he said, adding that he suspected the proposed secretariat would be widely dispersed throughout Africa, Asia, and North America.

The Geneva meeting was attended by more than 200 delegates from developing nations and the donor community, along with representatives of civil society and foundations.

Addressing the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC last week, Annan quoted a Harvard University study which had estimated that AIDS has already cost the world more than 500 billion dollars in economic and human losses.

“So, 10 billion dollars a year to defeat it seems fairly reasonable – in fact, a bargain,” he said.

Annan appealed to the business community for financial help to curb the spread of the disease, which he described as “an unparalleled nightmare.”

“As 42 percent of US exports go to markets in the developing world, the negative impact of AIDS on American business should be obvious,” he warned.

The epidemic is not only bad for business, he argued, but also undermines regional and global security and stability.

Calling on the business community to respond, he said: “Business is used to acting decisively and quickly. The same cannot always be said of the community of sovereign states. So we need your help – right now.”

By the end of 2000, about 36.1 million people were living with HIV or AIDS, and 21.8 million had died since the start of the epidemic about 20 years ago. Last year alone, some three million people died of AIDS-related causes and 5.3 million were newly infected.

At the same time, more than 500 million people are affected by malaria and one million people – mainly children – die each year from the disease. Tuberculosis kills about two million people each year.