Life happens here at the Tema Clinic in Accra, Ghana. Babies trade a death sentence for life. Mothers transform their sickly skeleton figures to healthy, able bodies. Tema offers hope in a place that was once hopeless and ravaged by AIDS.
Funded by the Global Fund through financial support from Product (RED), Tema Hospital cares for 2,200 people living with HIV. We recently visited their facility again –- their work never ceases to amaze me. The Global Fund make it possible for the hospital to provide ARV treatment and PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child-transmission). Thanks to these interventions, only 4 percent of babies at Tema with HIV-positive mothers are born with the virus.
In celebration of the Global Fund’s 10th anniversary, ONE Global Health Policy Manager Erin Hohlfelder reflects on the organization’s accomplishments over the years.
When I was ten, I was busy doing important things like mastering long division, practicing softball and rocking the plastic glasses/bowl cut combo. While I’m proud of those accomplishments, I have to say I’m even more proud today to honor all the incredible things that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has achieved in its first ten years of existence. To understand the Global Fund’s impact, it’s important to remember just how bad things were before it existed: Fewer than 50,000 Africans had access to AIDS treatment. Malaria was killing nearly 1 million people annually. Treating TB was considered too expensive for most of the developing world.
On a plot of land about the size of a football field sit two yellow-and-white structures. The small building (pictured at top) is a tuberculosis “clinic” responsible for serving the 2 million people who live in Huaycán, a township of Lima that has the second-highest TB prevalence rate in Peru.
At the recent UN High Level Meeting on AIDS, world leaders made a critical step in the right direction with the launch of a global plan to eliminate new HIV infections among children by 2015 and to keep their mothers alive. Last fall, ONE members tirelessly advocated for the Global Fund during our “No Child Born with HIV” campaign, and we’re pleased that this plan will help us work towards turning that goal into reality.
Tremendous gains have been made in recent years in reducing HIV infections among children and scaling up the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV, yet much work remains. In 2009, an estimated 370,000 new infections occurred among children, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. The global strategy identifies two top goals: to reduce the number of new infections among children by 90 percent and reduce the number of AIDS-related maternal deaths by 50 percent. Under the plan, resources will be channeled to 22 priority countries, where nearly all HIV-positive pregnant women live.
Last week, the Global Fund board of directors met to review a range of issues, the most pressing of which was answering concerns about reports by its Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the theft of money or drugs from Global Fund grants.
It’s an important discussion, but it can also be deflating. Donors are demanding action and threatening reduced funding. So, ONE and other advocacy groups do our best to provide facts and context, knowing that the scale of the problem is much smaller than the political response. At the same time, we’re all appalled. Stealing from the Global Fund is robbing innocent people of the medicines they need to stay alive; put bluntly, here theft is murder.. We also applaud the Global Fund’s work to discover misuse of funding, prosecute the thieves and recover the money.
Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, urges opponents of foreign aid to support the Global Fund in an op-ed for the Huffington Post today. His piece, “Global Fund deserves our support,” defends the Global Fund’s rigorous financial controls and stresses the role that the Fund plays in combating preventable diseases around the world.
Here’s an excerpt of his piece:
“Opponents of foreign aid like to paint it as wasted money that does nothing good for America. The fact is, foreign aid is working. Look at the countries of Africa, for instance; they have some of the fastest growing economies in the world. One reason is because of the work of groups like the Global Fund, because good health is a foundation of economic development.
Denying the Global Fund support because of its efforts to uncover and end corruption would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, though in this case it would literally mean denying millions of babies around the world the lifesaving medicines and care they need to reach their human potential.”
For the full story, go to the Huffington Post’s website.
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