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Where's
the Global Fund money?
IRIN News
November 04, 2008
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=81293
Zimbabwe's AIDS
organisations have condemned the government for failing to account
for more than US$7 million provided by the Geneva-based Global Fund
to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The money was held by
the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), but allocations were released
"erratically and only partially", the Fund said, and warned
that no future grants would be approved until all of the remaining
US$7.3 million was transferred to commercial banks and "we
are satisfied that our funds are safe".
Executive director of
the Fund, Prof Michel Kazatchkine, said the dribble of money released
by the RBZ, along with Zimbabwe's wider economic crisis, had affected
the implementation of programmes, "including the supply and
distribution of drugs".
"A full audit of
both the financial bottlenecks and programme implementation issues
has been carried out by the [Fund's] Office of the Inspector General
over the last three weeks and a report will be issued soon,"
Kazatchkine said.
The Fund said it had
been assured by the RBZ the money would be transferred by 6 November.
The chairperson
of the Zimbabwe
Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, Benjamin Mazhindu, told
IRIN he feared the cash-strapped government, which ordered in 2007
that all foreign exchange accounts be lodged with the RBZ, could
have dipped into those funds.
"Evil
and insensitive"
"Our suspicions
are that the RBZ was diverting money, meant for people and organisations
fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS, towards buying fertiliser, seed
and the national football team. That, for people living with HIV/AIDS,
is unacceptable, evil and insensitive, as it means somebody is gambling
with our lives."
Tinashe Mundawarara,
programme manager of Zimbabwe
Lawyers for Human Rights and an expert on AIDS and human rights
law, told IRIN his organisation would wait for the audit before
commenting.
"However, should
it turn out that some fraudulent activities were taking place, then
we will demand that the [Zimbabwean] House of Assembly should institute
an urgent audit of all Global Fund money.
"If the RBZ is found
on the wrong side of the law, then there will be grave consequences
for people living with HIV/AIDS because money from the Global Fund
occupies critical space in the fight against HIV/AIDS," Mundawarara
said.
The Global Fund has five
ongoing grants in Zimbabwe worth US$88 million, and between 2004
and 2007 disbursed just over US$39 million, which has helped to
enrol 13,000 people in AIDS treatment programmes and supply 330,000
insecticide-treated bed nets to combat malaria.
Zimbabwe has had a fraught
history with the Fund, but excitement was mounting that a US$500
million proposal made earlier this year would be approved after
the application was ruled "technically sound", the penultimate
step to final approval by the Fund's board of directors.
In seven rounds of funding
disbursements, Zimbabwe's applications have been successful in only
two. Health Minister David Parirenyatwa has frequently accused the
agency of political bias, which the Global Fund has strongly denied.
Maxwell Kapachawo, the
head of a network of religious leaders living with HIV/AIDS, said
failure by the RBZ to account for the Global Fund grant money underlined
the disregard the authorities had for HIV-positive people.
"What they may not
know is that we may lose the US$500 million which had [almost] been
approved for Zimbabwe. The implications for people living with HIV/AIDS
are dire because those funds go a long way in assisting us where
the government cannot do anything."
Of the 1.7 million people
living with HIV in Zimbabwe, 320,000 are in need of antiretroviral
drugs but only 100,000 are accessing free government treatment.
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