Countries need greater support and less stringent conditions if global fund goals are to be met

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) will today publish interim findings relating to how the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is being implemented in four African countries. The Fund was established in 2002 as a mechanism to get additional resources to affected countries to control these devastating diseases.

The findings, which appear in the Lancet, are based on interviews with 137 national level respondents. They reveal that the conditions set by the Global Fund around performance-based payments will be difficult for fund recipients and sub-recipients to meet, and that the Fund's goals may be threatened as a result. They also indicate that delays in getting funds to those who will use them have frustrated hopes of a quick scaling-up of disease control interventions.

The paper's lead author, Ruairí Brugha, Senior Lecturer in Public Health at LSHTM, comments: 'The Global Fund is one of several new global initiatives to finance HIV/AIDS control, each superimposed on the systems which already exist in the countries being targeted. What our interim findings show is that the Global Fund's goals will only be met if there are clearer guidelines, significant improvements in co-ordination among donors, and with simpler and more straightforward funding, planning, management and reporting systems'.

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