The Sunday News
THE National Aids Council (NAC) has secured a $25,2 million grant from the Global Fund to scale up the fight against the HIV and Aids pandemic.
Confirming the development, NAC monitoring and evaluating director Mr Amon Mpofu said the grant is going to assist in covering programmes that lack financial support, including antiretrovirals (ARVs) for children.
“We are happy to have managed to get this grant. With this incentive we are going to move a step further in achieving our targets. In the past, we talked about the need to increase ARVs for children and also behaviour change among youths. This funding will be channeled to address these issues,” he said.
“Out of the $25,2 million we are getting $20,2 million will be channeled to treatment and care which include improving the state of our laboratories and also to buy ARVs for children. The other $5 million will be used for behaviour change among youths as we have witnessed that new infections are now prevalent among youths.”
In a notice, the Global Fund said the grant was based on the Technical Review Panel’s prioritisation and recommendation.
“The fund will channel $12 million to address critical gaps in laboratory services including six viral load machines, integrated transport systems, early infant diagnosis and lab system strengthening,” read the announcement.
“Paediatric ARV (ARVs for children) will get $8 million to address critical gaps in paediatric treatment and provide community-based services to adolescents.”
Male circumcision will get $3 million to support innovative approaches to reaching adolescents, a newly identified gap, through scaling up of male circumcision focused on adolescent boys and young men.
More than 455 872 males have been circumcised since the inception of the Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision programme in March 2009.
The figure represents about 32 percent of the target set to circumcise 1,3 million men by 2017, in intensified efforts to reduce by half the rate of new HIV infections.
For Behaviour Change Communication and Voluntary Counselling and Testing, the grant will avail $2 million to support innovative approaches to reaching young women and girls, and planning for future focusing, including operational research, mapping and demand creation.
Global Fund is a public-private multi-billion-dollar international financing partnership established in 2002 with the objective of providing performance-based grant funding to assist countries in the fight against HIV and Aids, TB and malaria by dramatically increasing the availability of funding.
Zimbabwe once received grants worth $224,3 million for the HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis treatment. HIV and Aids got $126 million, $59 million was rewarded to Malaria and for Tuberculosis treatment $38,7 million was given.
The country is faced with a $3 billion funding gap in its HIV response programmes for the next decade and would want to improve its resource base to plug the gap.
The country needs about $7 billion to sustain its HIV response programmes from next year to 2025, but with the current funding levels, only $4 billion can be available.
