Thank you for your letter. We at the Global Fund
share your impatience with the pace of treatment scale-up throughout most of
the world. The global community has achieved significant progress over the
past three years, with Global Fund-financed programmes alone more than doubling
the number of people provided with treatment each year. But there are still
far too many men, women, and children in need of essential medicines.
We must collectively find the means to increase the
rate of scale-up if the goal of universal access, that we have all committed
ourselves to, is to be anything but a distant dream. The Global Fund’s
role in doing so is clear, we must provide sustainable and increased financing
to support effective treatment programmes. In this regard, we will focus on
two major priorities over the coming year.
The first is to ensure the effective implementation
of our substantial existing investments. Currently, AIDS programmes financed
by the Global Fund are achieving 83 percent of their aggregate targets for
providing antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. While this compares well to the
standard success rates of development projects, we are not satisfied. We would
like to see that rate increase to 100 percent or more and ensure that success
is well distributed across all the countries within our portfolio. This
heightened performance, and the increased strength of programmes that it
represents, will be critical to achieving our treatment goals.
While the Global Fund is a financing mechanism and
therefore not directly engaged in the implementation of programmes, there are
steps that we can take to ensure that the systems through which we commit and
channel our funding are best designed to support rapid scale-up. Our Board is
currently in the process of designing a four-year strategy for the Global Fund,
which, based on our experiences to date, seeks to refine or improve our
operations in a number of areas. For example, at its Fourteenth Meeting
earlier this month, the Board decided to establish a fixed calendar for the
launch and approval of new funding rounds, which will increase the
predictability of our funding,
thus assisting the essential planning process of our recipients. Several other
critical topics, including how to better leverage the investments of the Global
Fund to drive down the prices of essential medicines, diagnostics, and other
commodities, are being further developed and will be considered by the Board at
its next meeting in April 2007.
Of equal importance are the operational steps that I
and my team can and will take over the coming months to further enhance the
daily business of the Global Fund. Among these is the imperative of working
closely with our partners such as WHO, UNAIDS, and many others, to ensure that
struggling programmes are identified early and that appropriate technical
assistance is mobilized to get them back on track. We recognize that our
contribution to this vital process, the Early Alert and Response System, must
be strengthened. We have set ourselves a corporate target of ensuring that at
least 60 percent of the struggling grants identified by this system demonstrate
strong performance by the time of their two-year review. Reaching this target
will require even greater coordination with and support for our partners, and mechanisms such as the
Global Implementation Support Team (GIST), and I am hopeful that, at this time next
year, we will be able to report that we have indeed done so.
The second key priority is to secure substantial
additional resources and to ensure that countries in need are able to
effectively access them. Round 7, which will be launched in March of next
year, is the last opportunity for new Global Fund investments to have an impact
on the goal of universal access. Later
grants will not begin implementation in sufficient time. It is therefore
critical that this Round contains many high-quality grants for the scale-up of
treatment and other essential interventions, and that the Global Fund has
sufficient resources to finance all of them. Two weeks ago, we approved Round
6, which made a significant additional contribution to the fight against the
three diseases. The AIDS grants in that Round will finance the delivery of ARV
treatment to 200,000 people over five years. This compares to treatment for
nearly one million people in Round 4. If we are to reach universal access, we
must ensure that Round 7 again has a major focus on treatment alongside other
critical interventions.
It is for our many partners to provide countries with
assistance in developing high-quality proposals to ensure that Round 7 is the
major injection of additional resources that it can and must be. For our part,
we will work strenuously to raise the necessary resources to finance such a
robust Round, seeking to have over US$1 billion available by the time the Board
considers the batch of proposals one year from now. To aid us in meeting that
goal, our Board has formed a new Resource Mobilization Task Team that will
develop a strategy to effectively take the Global Fund’s income to the
next level. The Global Fund’s second replenishment process, which
will begin this coming March with a meeting in Oslo, will also play an important
role in the magnitude, predictability, and sustainability of the Global
Fund’s AIDS financing, ensuring that progress in treatment access can be
maintained well into the future.
With these priorities fulfilled, and similar contributions from our partners,
I am hopeful that we will see a marked increase in treatment scale-up in
affected countries. If you have any further questions regarding our work in
these or other areas, do not hesitate to contact me or my colleagues. Lastly,
in regard to your specific question on the process for refining proposals, this
is an issue for our Board to consider. I would therefore encourage you to
raise this issue for discussion through the civil society representatives on
the Board.
Thank you for all that you do in our mutual fight
against AIDS. We look forward to continuing to work closely with you until we
have at last provided treatment, prevention, and care to everyone who needs it.
I and my colleagues hope to have an opportunity to meet with you when you are
in
With best regards.
Richard
Professor Richard G
A Feachem CBE FREng DSc(Med)
Executive Director
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria
Chemin de Blandonnet 8
1214 Vernier
Dir: +41 22 791 1705
Fax: +41 22 791 1717
Tel: +41 22 791 1700
Email: richard.feachem@theglobalfund.org
From:
ChrisCSF@aol.com [mailto:ChrisCSF@aol.com]
Sent: 08 November 2006 19:13
To:
Cc: Jon Lidén; Bernhard
Schwartländer;
Subject: Re: Questions from ITPC
treatment report to Global Fund
Thank you very much for
your response.
We appreciate how busy
you have been.
the ITPC treatment
report team