New director and direction for the Global Fund

The Global Fund to fight AIDS TB and Malaria will announce the appointment of their new director tomorrow. The last director was ousted early this year because of a misallocation scandal.

The scandal has caused one of the leading organizations on global health to rethink their strategy. The Global Fund will begin to focus funding projects in the most vulnerable areas, instead of both poor and middle income areas. This is partly necessary because the scandal has caused a big drop in donations to the fund.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Sarah McHaney tells us more.

They need to do reform 2.0 which focuses on better measurement and accountability on actual disease results,” Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy at the Centre for Global Development, told IPS.

“We focus too much on paperwork being consistent instead of on what we want the paperwork to achieve,” she said.

The former executive director, Michel Kazatchkine, resigned at the beginning of this year after the AIDS Health Foundation wrote a report in September 2011 urging him to step down amidst a funding misallocation scandal.

More than a year later, the Global Fund is still attempting to recover from that experience, which saw millions of dollars go unaccounted for in four African countries.

“The Global Fund has a terrific record of saving lives, but they are being asked to bring on a new manager to completely redirect them,” Deb Derrick, the president of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, told IPS.

“They are going to cut their staff by 20 percent and operate under a tightened budget. But I think a good manager is very well-positioned to do even more with the resources at hand.”

The vast majority of that money, 95 percent, has come from the public sector. The United States leads donations, followed by France, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.

For this reason, however, the global financial crisis has hit the Global Fund hard, resulting in a large decrease of public sector donations. In May 2011, the Fund stated that it was 1.3 billion dollars short of its proposed budget for 2011-13.

The Global Fund gives grants based not only on need and vulnerability, but also on the results that recipient countries are able to show. Countries apply for each new round of funding and measure their results against the goals set by previous grants.

In November 2011, the Global Fund was forced to cancel its 11th round of funding due to inadequate resources from donors.