Africa Is a Country

Trouble at the Global Fund

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Trouble at the Global Fund

By
Caitlin L Chandler

As Brett pointed out at the end of 2011, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB & Malaria (GFATM) recently had to cancel a new round of grants because funding has severely declined, and commitments made by donor countries have yet to materialize. As a result of the lack of funding, progress in many countries against the three diseases will be crippled until GFATM has the resources it needs. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres, 500 people marched in Nairobi on January 30th to protest the lack of funding for GFATM, which will directly impact people in Kenya. The Executive Director of the Global Fund,  Michel Kazatchkine (in the picture above), also resigned last week.

In his resignation letter, Kazatchkine wrote,

Today, the Global Fund stands at a cross-road. In the international political economy, power-balances are shifting and new alignments of countries and decision-making institutions are emerging or will have to be developed to achieve global goals. Within the area of global health, the emergency approaches of the past decade are giving way to concerns about how to ensure long-term sustainability, while at the same time, efficiency is becoming a dominant measure of success.

“It is almost possible to hear Kazatchkine spitting out the words ‘sustainability’ and ‘efficiency’,” wrote long-time HIV journalist Laurie Garret in a recent analysis of GFATM’s current situation in Nature, titled, “Global health hits crisis point.”

In response to some of the recent news coverage of GFATM, the clever Auntie Retroviral has created a video to educate viewers on ‘Global Fund Villains’ – the people and issues which the Global Fund has dealt with in trying to ensure people around the world have access to life-saving medicine.

Further Reading

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.