Postscript: Recession and Reinventions

Abstract

On World AIDS Day (1 December) 2011, Nonkosi Khumalo, the chairperson of the TAC, issued a statement on the ‘crisis in global health’. Khumalo’s World AIDS Day statement went out into cyberspace from London, where she was conducting a speaking tour which included an address to the All Party Parliamentary Group on HIV/AIDS at Westminster. Khumalo delivered a straightforward message to the world that day: global health needed a ‘bail out’ (2011). The Global Fund had just announced that it would not consider any fresh grant proposals until 2014. Spain, Italy and Ireland had all failed to give monies they had pledged to the Global Fund, forcing it to cancel its 11th round of funding. This meant that the fund could only provide money to existing programmes. Yet, Khumalo wrote, millions were still waiting for life-saving treatment in Southern Africa. For the TAC chairperson, the crisis in global health financing was a clear example of how the world’s most marginalized were being ‘made to pay’ for the financial crisis started by the banks and hedge funds. If Germany could bail out corrupt banks, Khumalo reasoned, surely it would ‘be morally and ethically right for them [the German government] to bail out the Global Fund too’. The provision of adequate financing for the Global Fund was all-the-more urgent given the findings of a new NIH-funded study, which showed that combination ARV therapy could reduce HIV transmission by 96%.