Global Fund and US Government Top External Financiers of AIDS, TB and Malaria: Report

Author:

Karanja Kinyanjui

Article Number: 11

ABSTRACT The Global Fund and the United States government are the top funders of malaria, AIDS and TB globally, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that seeks to improve coordination in global funding of the three diseases.

As the Global Fund prepares to hold its fourth replenishment conference in early November, seeking USD15 billion for the next three years to fund the fight against AIDS, TB and malaria, the Kaiser Family Foundation has released a new study showing that the Fund and the United States are the largest external funders of programming into all three diseases worldwide.

The study, Mapping the Donor Landscape in Global Health, seeks to improve global coordination of funding for the three diseases in the nine regions categorized using data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The Global Fund contributed more than 60% of all external funding for tuberculosis worldwide, and 57% of all donated malaria funding. Nineteen percent of funding for HIV/AIDS programming worldwide comes from the Global Fund’s contributors.

The United States, through its own bilateral or independent funding mechanisms, was second overall, providing 26% of external funding for malaria, 21% for TB and 61% for HIV/AIDS.

The study’s accounting  of US contributions to the donor-funded fight against the three diseases did not explicitly explain that US government funding is responsible for 67% of all programming implemented worldwide, owing to its contribution of one-third of all Global Fund financing.

The breadth of funding was as extensive as the amount; according to the report, 105 of 109 countries around the world received some form of financial contribution from the two for TB, 80 of 86 countries had Global Fund or US-funded programs in malaria and 114 of the 143 countries that received HIV/AIDS donor assistance did so from the two donors.

Rounding out the top five for magnitude of funding of TB were Canada (6%), the World Bank (4%) and the UK (4%), who, together with the Global Fund (60%) and the US (21%), contributed more than 95% of the external funding for the global fight against what is considered the oldest human disease.

In the malaria sector, the UK (7%), the World Bank (6%) and Canada (1%) joined the Global Fund (57%) and the US (26%) in contributing 97% of all donor funding for malaria. For HIV/AIDS programming worldwide funded by donors, the US contributed 61%, the Global Fund 19% and the UK (3%), UNAIDS (3%) and the World Bank (2%).

Sub-Saharan Africa – South Sahara according to the OECD designation – was, consistently, the largest recipient region for foreign aid in the fight against two of the three diseases, absorbing 76% of external funding in malaria, 57% in HIV/AIDS, and 26% for TB: just one percentage point behind the largest regional recipient, South and Central Asia at 27%.

The full reports can be found online at the Kaiser Family Foundation website: http://kff.org/global-health-policy/report/mapping-the-donor-landscape-in-global-health-series/.