The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announces it has awarded to date a total of $4 billion to more than 100 low- and middle-income countries to fight COVID-19, adapt Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV), Tuberculosis (TB) and malaria programmes, and urgently reinforce fragile systems for delivering health services. This funding is on top of the over $4.2 billion a year the Global Fund provides to countries to fight HIV, TB and malaria.
Since March 2021, when new funding became available thanks to the support of donors led by the United States, followed by Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the Global Fund has awarded $3 billion for COVID-19 through its COVID-19 Response Mechanism (C19RM), created by the Global Fund in March 2020. This builds on the $1 billion funding the Global Fund approved for the COVID-19 response in 2020.
“The Global Fund’s ability to act swiftly and at scale to support countries’ COVID-19 responses reflects the power and the agility of the Global Fund partnership. We have been supporting countries to meet the new challenges posed by the pandemic in 2021, including surges in infections and deaths driven by the Delta variant, acute oxygen shortages and the need to support vaccine rollout through strengthening systems for health,” said Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund.
“Our recent Results Report demonstrated how badly COVID-19 has impacted HIV, TB and malaria programmes. Yet, without the rapid and determined actions that took place across the Global Fund partnership to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the three diseases, it would have been much worse.” (Guardian)
