I’m guessing a very large majority of the 1.4 million people getting AIDS treatment, the 3.3 million treated for TB, the 46 million people who have received mosquito nets paid for by the Global Fund, have no idea something called the Global Fund exists.

I’ve been visiting Tanzania this week, and the Global Fund wasn’t very visible, except when President Bush mentioned it. Does that matter?

After all, the Global Fund is just a way to collect the best proposals from countries, choose the best ones based on good science and medicine, and then monitor success. They have no offices in any of the 136 countries where they fund programs.

So if your relatives are getting mosquito nets, it probably doesn’t matter to you. Like most people, John Moses Nyahenge, a computer science student I spoke with in Dar es Salaam, said AIDS and malaria were two of the biggest challenges in Tanzania, that the U.S. is helping, and that he hadn’t heard of the Global Fund.

“They know it’s the US that saved their lives,” said Pam White, who runs the U.S. Agency for International Development in Tanzania, said about Zanzibar island. That’s true. In addition to the presidential initiatives on AIDS and malaria, the US is the largest contributor to the Global Fund (though France and Sweden and dozens of other countries, plus companies, foundations and (RED) buyers do too).

I do some work for the Global Fund, and I’ve met a lot of the staff. They’re fairly normal people, putting in long hours in an office across the highway from an airport. The good they help people do is pretty remarkable – more than 2 million people are alive today who wouldn’t be.

You can read more at strong>www.investinginourfuture.org.

-Seth Amgott

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 7:23 am and is filed under Tanzania, Bush Africa Trip, Global Fund, HIV/AIDS, Malaria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.