Ethiopian Review

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria (Global Fund) has made a grant of 133 million dollars to the Ethiopian Ministry of Health (MoH) to support the country’s effort to fight malaria.
The agreement was signed by Professor Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund, and Tedros Adhanom, PhD, Minister of the Ministry of Health, who is also the chair of the fund, last Thursday at the ministry’s head office. Meshesha Shewarega, PhD, Executive Director of the Christian Relief and Development Association (CRDA) and Tesfaye Yacob, Board Member of the Ethiopian Inter-Faith Forum for Development (EIFFD), also co-signed the agreement.

The fund, an independent public-private partnership first proposed by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan back in 2001, and officially formed in 2002, aims to support Ethiopia’s malaria prevention and build the capacity of the health sector for the coming two years as part of the Global Fund’s Round 8 grant.

The Global Fund raises funds and pool money from governments, businesses and individuals around the world and channels them into grant programs to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

“Over the past few years, the ministry, along with its development partners, has registered substantial results in reducing the morbidity rate instigated by malaria,” Dr. Tedros noted at the event, adding that the Round 8 grant will be used to build on the robust progress on malaria control.

The genesis of the Global Fund was an article published in the British medical journal The Lancet by Harvard academics Amir Attaran and Jeffrey Sachs. They, in January 2001, called for an order of magnitude increase in foreign aid budgets for HIV/AIDS over those which researchers called for in the 1990s.

The decision to create the new funding stream was taken by heads of state at the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, at the urging of then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, and largely along the lines Attaran and Sachs described.

The first secretariat was established in January 2002 and Richard Feachem was appointed as its first Executive Director in July of that year. The September 2005 conference in London mobilized three billion euros, just over half the pledges at the Gleneagles G8 summit. In December 2002, the fund made its first disbursement to grantees.

Professor Kazatchkine said that while 97.3 million dollars of the grant will be used to support malaria related activities, the remaining 35.7 million dollars will be spent on cross-cutting health-system related activities.

“The funding from this grant will build on the impressive results achieved to date in the control of malaria in Ethiopia and complement the efforts of the Government and partners to achieve key goals,” he remarked.

The board of the Global Fund elected Tedros Adhanom as its chair and Ernest Loevinsohn, Director General of the Program against Hunger, Malnutrition and Disease in the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) as its Vice-Chair at the beginning of July. Tedros and Loevinsohn are serving on the board for the period commencing 6 July 2009 until the adjournment of the first meeting of 2011. Tedros succeeded Rajat Gupta, a senior partner and former managing director of McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm.

In Ethiopia, two grants worth 214.5 million dollars from the Global Fund and additional support from other donors have helped the Government implement an aggressive strategy of malaria control.
Until recently, Ethiopia was lagging behind many African countries in combating malaria, with less than five per cent of households owning a mosquito net in 2003. In 2004, the Government set an ambitious new target to have all households in high-risk areas own at least two long-lasting mosquito nets by 2008.

Ethiopia had exceeded this target by March 2008 after delivering 20.5 million bed nets, representing a three-fold increase and achieving 95 per cent coverage in endemic areas. Along with expanded access to effective treatment, this scale-up has fueled significant reductions in malaria incidence and mortality, with a 60 per cent reduction in malaria cases and a 50 per cent reduction in child deaths from malaria registered between 2004 and 2006.

- By Elias Meseret | Capital Ethiopia