Global Fund is key to Millennium Goals by Winstone Zulu

Global Fund is key to Millennium Goals

By Winstone Zulu

When President Obama comes to the United Nations this month to discuss the Millennium Development Goals, I hope he’ll talk about the tremendous impact of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Actually, I hope he’ll do more than talk about the Global Fund’s impact. I hope… No, I pray he will announce a new three-year commitment of $6 billion that will not only allow the Global Fund to continue its life-saving work, but also expand its reach to finally turn the tide on diseases that have terrorized millions.

Without the Global Fund, much of Africa would be falling apart now, which was the case at the turn of the century when AIDS was killing off so many mothers and fathers, teachers and civil servants. In 2003, however, when Global Fund-backed programs began placing patients on antiretroviral therapy, hope was restored.

In Zambia, where I live, the difference is miraculous.

It’s hard for outsiders to fully grasp the devastation that swept across the continent in those years. Whenever I visited Lusaka, I was afraid to ask the whereabouts of people I knew. Oftentimes the answer was, “Didn’t you hear?” Nothing else needed to be said.

It wasn’t only friends and acquaintances I lost during that horrible time. All four of my brothers, their immune systems likely compromised by HIV, died from tuberculosis because they lacked access to $20 worth of antibiotics that could have cured them. They left behind over a dozen children who grew up without fathers.

The AIDS epidemic in Zambia was so bad in the mid ’90s that employers would train two people at a time for an accounting job, knowing that one would die within a year or two. The worst of it, though, was the children left orphaned. So many of them had to drop out of school and go begging in the streets for food.

This grim scene changed when the Global Fund started supporting programs that provided treatment for people with AIDS and TB.

Now when I visit a town and ask, “Where’s John?”, the answer is not “Didn’t you hear?” The response is more likely to be, “He went to Botswana for work” or “He went to South Africa to go to school.”

In short, the Global Fund stopped the terror that was literally draining the life out of our society, our culture and our economy. The Global Fund has helped deliver AIDS treatment to 2.8 million people, detected and treated 7 million cases of TB, and distributed 122 million bed nets to prevent malaria.

To deliver these results, the Global Fund created a new model of development assistance. Developing countries assess their needs and come up with their own proposals and the amount of funding needed to achieve measurable goals. An independent panel of experts evaluates proposals, and grants are awarded. Countries are then held accountable for achieving the goals in their proposals, with progress measured on a regular basis.

As we near the 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, it’s clear that the Global Fund can play a decisive role in achieving the goals related to global health. In our interconnected world, these are goals that, if achieved, will lift all nations, not just the poor ones.

Last year, President Obama announced a six-year, $63 billion Global Health Initiative. Committing just $6 billion of this over the upcoming three years to the Global Fund would help ensure the success of the President’s Initiative, leverage other donor resources for the Global Fund, and help achieve some truly remarkable goals. With sufficient resources, the Global Fund can help ensure that by 2015 no children are born with HIV, malaria is no longer a public health scourge in much of Africa, and dangerous drug-resistant strains of TB are under control.

Having witnessed Zambia before and after the Global Fund, I much prefer the latter. Rather than return to those dark times, which could happen if support for the Global Fund waivers, let us usher in a new era, one where children have mothers and fathers to care for them, and a where a friend’s absence is more likely to be a cause for joy instead of sorrow.

Fight Global AIDS&TB with Twitter!

Do you have a twitter account or know someone who does? Here's a really easy way to support the Global Fund. The White House is going make a decision very soon whether or not to provide our fair share to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS TB and Malaria..maybe even this week. A broad movement like this on Twitter can really show a swelling of public support for this idea to a President that understands that social media is a real force.

Please take this action from the ONE campaign...
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Personally, I tweet about a lot of things: bad movies, favorite Onion articles, proud accomplishments in the world of novice cooking—but today I'm using Twitter to do something a lot more remarkable and I hope you will too.

Right now, I and thousands of others are tweeting directly to President Obama, asking him to increase support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria over the next three years. We need you to join us:

Click here to tweet!

Because of advances in science and technology, we now know how to prevent a baby from being born with HIV. And if the Global Fund gets the funding it needs over the next three years, virtually no baby will be born with HIV by 2015.

Unfortunately, the President proposed a cut to the Global Fund and we need to change his mind.

One tweet might not make a huge difference—but thousands of tweets from all across the country really can get his attention. We built a very simple tool to make it easy for you. Check it out:

Click here to tweet!


I signed up to become a ONE member back in 2005 – and for me, there are a handful of campaigns that really stand out. This Global Fund campaign is one of those.

I can't thank you enough for all you've done with ONE.

–Ginny Simmons, Deputy Director of New Media, @ONECampaign

P.S. Not on Twitter? You can still help out: just forward this email to someone you know that is on Twitter, and tell them it’s time to collect on that favor they owe you. We really appreciate it.

Microbicidal gel and education empower women to stay HIV free

There is exciting news in the field of HIV/AIDS prevention!

1) A promising new microbicidal gel has shown that women who used it were 39% less likely over all to contract HIV than those who used a placebo. Regular usage even reduced transmission chances by 54%!

2) A study in Malawi showed that offering impoverished girls small amounts of money for regular school attendance reduced AIDS and herpes infection. After a year and a half of the program, girls who received payments were less than half as likely to be infected than girls whose families got no payments. The girls started to have sex later, less often and with fewer partners.

What this says to me is what we have known all along. Empowering women to make their own choices...whether through education or access to health information and resources...is a key to fighting AIDS and poverty.


Here's the article in the New York Times about it.

Is Obama Backing away from the fight against Global AIDS?

This is an interview with Dr. Paul Zeitz- the executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, a position he's held since 2001. Over the past decade, he's led GAA to promote universal access to prevention, treatment and care, among other issues. As backlash against the Obama administration’s policies on global HIV/AIDS continues to mount, Dr. Zeitz shares his perspective with Change.org.

Click Here for the Interview


Here is an exerpt:

Q: One of President Bush’s signature acts was the creation of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) — the largest single effort any nation’s yet made to scale up HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment. PEPFAR was a major victory for activists around the globe. How has the program been impacted since Obama took office?

Back in 2008, President Bush decided that before he left office, he wanted to authorize another 5-year PEPFAR cycle. Senators Obama, Biden and Clinton all cosponsored the bill to reauthorize the bill, known as the Lantos-Hyde bill, committing the U.S. government to providing $48 billion over five years [2009-2013]. It was a truly historic act by then-president Bush to really take the initiative to the next level.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama signed a pledge committing to $50 billion for global AIDS spending for the period of 2009-2013. He also spoke at the Saddleback Church HIV/AIDS conference and verbally committed to increasing global AIDS spending by at least 1 billion per year, if he was elected.

Then he got elected, then the transition team started governing, and within 18 months, everything’s changed.

Q: Since Obama took office, what about his administration's approach have you found particularly disheartening?

We’d had breakthrough with Bush. Global leaders and stakeholders had committed themselves to universally scale up aids prevention and access to treatment. The whole global international community was in solidarity with the goal of universal access to prevention and treatment.

President Obama and his administration have taken a radically different position. It’s crystal clear that they don’t believe that HIV/AIDS treatment should be made available to everyone, because they think it’s too expensive. I’ve sat and others have sat in high-level meetings in which administration officials talking about how the U.S. government could not sustain the demands of a “treatment mortgage,” saying, “How can we afford this?”

The president has virtually flat-lined [PEPFAR] in his first two budget request. Even more shockingly, Obama has requested cuts to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, & Malaria’s FY2011 budget — this despite how effective the Global Fund’s work has been as a multilateral financing instrument. It’s achieved remarkable results, saving an estimated 4.9 million lives. The Obama administration says they’re committed to multilateralism. So why do they want to cut U.S. government support of the program?