Global Fund Asks Caribbean Community To Cut Budget of Grant Request
Caribbean Community officials on Tuesday announced that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has asked Caricom to cut its $56 million grant proposal to the fund, Agence France-Presse reports. While the fund called the proposal "technically sound," it requested that Caricom "down-size the budget," according to Edward Greene, assistant secretary general for human and social development in Caricom. According to Agence France-Presse, the Global Fund has effectively run out of money (Agence France-Presse, 2/18). Global Fund Executive Director Richard Feachem has said that while the Global Fund has received more than $2 billion from governments and donors, it will need three times that amount to meet demand over the next two years (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 12/16/2002). The Pan Caribbean Partnership on HIV/AIDS is expected to cut the requested funds to between $25 million and $30 million, according to an unnamed source at Caricom. The money would fund a campaign to remove the stigma associated with the disease, provide care and treatment at a regional level for HIV-positive people and design "harmonized" training manuals for HIV/AIDS educators, EFE News Service reports. UNAIDS estimates that at least 500,000 people in the Caribbean region are HIV-positive, and the University of the West Indies predicts that the total cost of a comprehensive response to the epidemic in the region would be approximately $260 million a year, 10 times the current spending in the region (EFE News Service, 2/18).
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