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Global Fund to help pay Zimbabwe doctors
Thenjiwe Mabhena , ZimOnline
February 15, 2008

http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=2716

Harare - The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has agreed to help pay salaries of Zimbabwean doctors and medical staff in bid to stem a massive brain-drain that has seen the best qualified health professionals leave the country.

Health Minister David Parirenyatwa on Thursday told Zim Online that at least 44 medical doctors, pharmacists and laboratory technicians based at district hospitals would have their salaries topped up by the Global Fund.

"Some doctors will have a top-up (of salaries) in local currency. The money is from our partners. It is going to help us retain doctors and curb the current brain-drain," said Parirenyatwa.

Since its creation in 2002, the Washington-based Global Fund has become the dominant financier of programmes to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, providing well over 20 percent of all international finance against AIDS and two thirds of global financing for TB and malaria.

The Fund has over the past few years shifted towards supporting the salaries of health staff in an attempt to retain their services in impoverished African countries. Its decision to help fund salaries will come as a relief to Zimbabwe's health professionals, among the poorest paid in southern Africa.

Hundreds of doctors and nurses as well as other professionals such as engineers, lawyers and accountants had fled Zimbabwe over the past eight years to seek better paying jobs and living conditions in neighboring countries and as far afield as Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

The brain-drain has helped exacerbate the rot in a public health sector - once among the best in the developing world - but now barely functional at the best of times due to under-funding, drug shortages and an overload of HIV/AIDS cases.

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