Game over for MDGs
Recently health related NGOs all over the world condemned the decision by the Global Fund to cancel Round 11 Funding and place restriction on Grant renewals. The implications of this action are far reaching, with Jeffery Sachs, PhD – the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special advisor to Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, going so far as to say “it’s game over for the Millennium development Goals’.
Adding his voice to the condemnation of the decision was Stephen Lewis, Co-Director of AIDS Free World. His remarks at the 2011 International Conference on Aids and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, December 6, 2011 did not pull any punches:
… if you sense a certain impatience in me, you’re right. We don’t have another day to lose. Peter Piot did the arithmetic yesterday 1,350,000 put on treatment in 2010; 2,700,000 new infections, exactly double the number in treatment in the same year. It works out to 7,397 new infections every day. And it’s 2011, for God’s sake.
But right at the moment when we know, irrefutably, that we can defeat this pandemic, we’re sucker-punched at the Global Fund.
What’s a sucker punch? It’s when a boxer in the ring gets a punch below the belt that he doesn’t see coming. No one expected a complete cancellation of Round Eleven, with new money unavailable for implementation until 2014.
It’s just the latest blow in a long list of betrayals on the part of the donor countries; in this instance the Europeans in particular. I’ve heard from several people that the politics of the Global Fund meeting in Accra two weeks ago, when the decision was made, were not just complicated, but amounted to miserable internecine warfare. Certain governments on the Board of the Global Fund simply discredited themselves. They give a soiled name to the principle of international solidarity [].
The decision on the part of the donor countries is unforgiveable. In a speech a few days ago, I addressed the Global Fund predicament by talking of the moral implications of a decision that you know will result in death on the African continent.
I asked: “Do they regard Africa as a territorial piece of geographic obsolescence? Do they regard Africans themselves as casually expendable? Is it because the women and children of Africa are not comparable in the eyes of western governments to the women and children of Europe and North America? Is it because Africans are black and unacknowledged racism is at play? Is it because a fighter jet is worth so much more than human lives? Is it because defense budgets are more worthy of protection in an economic downturn than millions of human beings?”
Read the full statement here