“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
-Wallace Stevens

Gaps in The Global Fund

The Global Fund is in a crisis.

The Global Fund is an organization founded by the U.N. under Kofi Annan in 2002 whose mission is to alleviate the problems of Malaira, Tuberculosis, and AIDS. It was deemed “a new approach to international health financing”. At its inception, it proposed a $10 billion dollar fund to be set-up for individual countries to apply for. This is the Global Fund’s innovation. By mandating that countries apply for aid by supplying quality proposals, the Fund is doing nothing more than acting as a sound lender (an idea many financial executives on Wall Street haven’t tried in a couple business cycles) to a growing need for global health funding.

The Fund, since its inception, has done a lot of good for the world’s 3 major health problems. It has injected 57% of all the funding that goes TB treatment, 60 % of all that goes to Malaria treatment, and 23% of all  HIV/AIDS. Because of this funding, 4.6 million people have received treatment and another 70 million are the proud owners of TB-treated bednets. On the HIV/AIDS front, 2 million individuals are now on ARV (Antiretroviral) medications while another 62 million have been tested. Another 445,000 mothers are on PMTCT (Preventing Mother to Child Transmission) medication. But not only has The Fund affected those with the actual virus, it has helped over 3 million orphans who have been impacted by HIV/AIDS infection in their families.

So with all of the good that is being done, why is The Global Fund having such a hard time finding funding? It is a two-fold problem. First, Round 8 of their Technical Review Panel decisions yielded a 300% increase in approval from the last round. This means that country proposals are of a higher quality and are more ambitious. This is a great problem to have, because it shows that these countries are taking more and more initiative in their own public health systems. But, (and there is always a but in these situations) the member countries who proposed to back The Fund are starting to break their promises. This creates a humongous gap in what the Fund has promised and what the Fund is actually able to give. That gap right now is 9.8 billion dollars.

How do we solve this problem? I see two different approaches, both on opposite ends of a spectrum. The first, the simplest and probably most ineffective, would be to renege on the promises the Fund has given to these needy and (more importantly) willing countries. But what would this do for us in the long run? Nothing but increase an already inspid pessimism of global legislative initiatives to aid global health and poverty. The second, the most difficult (and most beneficial), action to take would be giving hell to our politicians. In situations like this, when the government is not supplying a need (or even a promise) to a large and detached populous, people have a tendency to not care about government action (research any articles on an economist’s “myth of the rational voter” to see my point). Thus the only way to shrink the gap between our promises and our payments, we MUST lobby together for a healthier world.