Volunteers hanging up nets in Aboabusu, Ghana

On 28 January 2012 the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria will celebrate its tenth birthday. The Fund accounts for around two thirds of all international aid funding for malaria and is vital to helping prevent, diagnose and treat the disease.

It is hard to visualise the sheer scale of what the Fund has achieved through the support of its donors (including the British and American governments) and partners in developing countries. An unprecedented global health initiative, the Fund has saved almost 8 million lives in the past ten years.

Some incredible figures:

• Since 2002 the Global Fund has distributed over 190 million insecticide treated nets for the prevention of malaria. And malaria deaths have dropped 26% in the last decade.
• The Global fund has treated over 8.2 million cases of Tuberculosis since 2002.
• Forty eight percent of all people on AIDS treatment depend on the Global Fund to receive their medication.

A strong, well funded, Global Fund is critical to achieving an end to the suffering and death caused by malaria. In Ghana, for example, where we are supporting Government efforts to get everyone in the country access to a mosquito net, the Global Fund is playing a vital role in helping fund nets for distribution. Without the support of the Global Fund, Ghana simply could not achieve its malaria goals. In addition to its essential support for malaria prevention, testing and treatment in Ghana, the Global Fund also provides critical core support to the national malaria control programme, the key coordinating body in Ghana’s fight against the disease and one of our principal partners.

The UK Government is a key supporter of the Global Fund, ranking it highly effective in last year’s multilateral aid review. We should be proud of the UK Government’s record of supporting this unprecedented initiative and take this opportunity to celebrate success so far. However, there is still much more to do for all three diseases. Today, the Global Fund is facing significant resource challenges and the success already achieved in the fight against malaria is threatened by lack of future funding. We are encouraging the UK Government and all donors to look at the results the Global Fund has already achieved and increase support; and more broadly to sustain and increase funding to tackle malaria.

In the past few months we have partnered with the Global Poverty Project to encourage supporters to write to their MPs. 233 letters have been sent to MPs and more than 700 people have signed our petition calling on the Government to increase its support for the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria. We will continue to work with other organisations across the globe this year to call on all governments to support the Global Fund and to help it continue its vital work.

Our supporters letters also thank MPs for the cross party commitment to achieving the spending target of 0.7 GNI for aid by 2013/14. This issue will be the subject of discussion in Parliament in the coming months and we are keen to see the British government enshrine into law its commitment to achieving 0.7 and sustaining this commitment in the years ahead. We are working with a broad coalition of other organisations to campaign on this issue and to support Living Proof, a campaign to showcase the progress being made in development.

Sign the petition to ‘Fund The Fund’
Visit theglobalfund.org