KENYA: Global Fund rejection brings a rethink
NAIROBI, 29 October 2008 (PlusNews) - Kenya will have to find new sources of funding to keep more than 200,000 people on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment after the country’s latest bid for support from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was rejected, a senior government official said.
“We are too dependent on donor funding for programmes like these [related to HIV, malaria and tuberculosis], which are vital to the health of our people - we must start becoming more self-reliant,” Danson Mungatana, Assistant Minister for Medical services, said on 27 October.
Although the Global Fund’s Technical Review Panel recommended that Kenya’s proposal be rejected, the final decision lies with the Fund’s board of directors, due to meet in India in November; however, the board has never disagreed with the review panel.
Mungatana noted that the rejection in the Fund’s eighth round of funding was unlikely to have an immediate effect, as the money from the previous round of funding would last until 2010. Kenya had applied for US$130 million for HIV programmes, $100 million for malaria and $70 million for tuberculosis.
An estimated 98 percent of Kenya’s AIDS programmes are donor funded; no funds were set aside for HIV and AIDS in the country’s national budget announced in July.
“For us as a country, we need to ask ourselves, is this sustainable? It is not,” Mungatana said. “We are making a direct appeal that the treasury now must start to prioritise our issues.”
[...]
IRIN