PHA-Exchange> Feachem Says Global Fund Could Dry Up By the Middle of Next Year

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Feachem Says Global Fund Could Dry Up By the Middle of Next Year

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Richard Feachem, director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis
and Malaria, said that the fund will run out of money by the middle of
next year unless it receives new donations, the Boston Globe reports.
The fund has received $2.1 billion in pledges but has collected only
$500 million.  Earlier this year, the fund's board approved $616 million
in grants in the first round of applications and is set to review the
second round of projects in January.  However, no "substantial" pledges
have been made to the fund for months, and donations from the private
sector are particularly low, the Globe reports.  Feachem said, "The
danger is we would make round two awards at the end of January that we
ultimately couldn't finance.  Round three in June is when the crunch is
really going to hit. ... We can't go on making commitments to fund
projects without being dead sure we have the money."  Feachem also
announced that auditing firms KPMG, Crown Agents and
PriceWaterhouseCoopers will monitor the fund's spending for programs in
some developing countries (Donnelly, Boston Globe, 10/7).

Fund 'Hobbled'?

The Global Fund was meant to be "an unprecedented partnership between
rich nations and multinational companies to vanquish" AIDS, TB and
malaria, but it has raised "only a sliver of the money it needs" and is
"hobbled" by structural requirements, Toronto Globe and Mail foreign
affairs writer Stephanie Nolen writes in an opinion piece.  In addition
to a lack of money, the fund faces trouble because it was created to be
independent of other multilateral entities such as the United Nations,
Nolen states, noting that although the fund cannot use existing
multilateral organizations to help manage its spending and has had to
create its own infrastructure, accounting and procurement operations,
donors want the fund to be "light" and "poised to disburse funds fast."
   She notes that there are other conflicts regarding which countries
should receive money from the fund and whether the governments that
receive funding from the organization should meet certain criteria.
Nolen concludes that if the fund in its current state is the "radical
solution, things don't bode well for the problem" of how to fight
HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria
 (Nolen, Toronto Globe and Mail, 10/5).