On 2nd May 2013, Humanitarian Centre members and non-members alike gathered in Emmanuel College’s Queens’ Lecture Theatre for the Humanitarian Centre’s Annual Lecture. The speaker was Bernard Rivers, founder of Aidspan, an organisation set up to offer independent viewpoints the activities of the Global Fund.
The main focus of his talk was the Global Fund and the challenges he has seen it face over the past eleven years, while running Aidspan.
The Global Fund was set up in 2002, partly in response to Kofi Annan’s statement that there was a need for a “war chest” of seven to ten billion dollars for developing countries to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Bernard Rivers (c) Cambridge News
Eleven years later, the fight against these diseases is still necessary and relevant. At present there are about 35 million people living with HIV, the majority of whom do not yet know they have the disease. 1 million people die of tuberculosis every year and half a million more die of malaria, the majority of them children.
Rivers pithily describes the Global Fund’s starting mission as “raise it, spend it, prove it”. It placed a great emphasis on rigorous audit, transparency and performance-based funding. The Global Fund also stressed that countries which received funding be able to manage how the money was spent, by means of a committee composed of government and non-governmental members.
It was the unique combination of these features, Rivers said, that attracted him to work alongside the Global Fund in the first place: “Every one of these features is possessed in some form by other major grant-making organisations, but there is no other multi-billion dollar grant-making organisation that possesses all of them.”
He established Aidspan in 2002, after attracting attention from funders by publishing the Global Fund Observer, a newsletter containing news, analysis and commentary on the Global Fund. Aidspan’s Global Fund Observer also publishes guides for organisations to help them apply for Global Fund money.
Rivers was clear on his overall mission for the organisation from the start: “our approach to Aidspan was this: 8.6 million lives saved by the Global Fund over a decade or so. Could the Global Fund be one percent more effective? One percent more efficient? Sure. Could it aspire to pushing and helping the Global Fund in various ways to be one percent more effective? We can aspire to that. What is one percent of 8.6 million lives? It is 86,000 people. Is this work worth doing? Yes it is.”
In the 11 years it has been operational, the Global Fund has saved almost 9 million lives, an “amazing success” by anyone’s standards. It has achieved this by raising 25 billion dollars, dispersing roughly three billion per year to projects that form 82% of global financing for TB, 50% of global financing for Malaria and 21% of global financing for AIDS.
However, the Global Fund has also had its fair share of challenges. Aside from bureaucratic and management problems, Rivers explained that the Global Fund experienced its hardest period in 2011, when their principles of transparency and vigorous audit came into conflict.
After doing their own investigations they found that threecountries in west Africa, of the 150 that receive Global Fund money, were implicated in fraud. True to their values of transparency, the Global Fund published the report on the internet—“warts and all”. This provided the Associated Press with an excuse to lead with the headline, ‘Fraud Plagues the Global Fund’, which sparked nervousness among both donors and recipients of Global Fund money.
However, the Global Fund weathered the storm, and is now looking to raise 15 billion dollars to fund further projects over the next three years.
Although he has recently retired as Head of Aidspan, Rivers was vocal in his viewpoint of what should come next for the Global Fund:“In the longer term, they must shift their emphasis from that ‘cashier demanding receipts’ to an ‘investor demanding results’. Ultimately the Global Fund’s role should not be to pay for activities that have been performed, but to pay for results achieved.”
Many audience members had dashed to the Humanitarian Centre’s Annual Lecture from another global health lecture, and were keen to follow up Rivers’ talk with questions on the wider impact of the Global Fund, and development challenges related to the diseases it tackles and others.
The subsequent drinks reception was also lively, with representatives from Humanitarian Centre member organisations and non-members alike eager to discuss what they had just heard.
One attendee commented: “What I like about talks like this, is that they give you a perspective on the general development sector. The audience questions were very interesting too; it makes you think, if the Global Fund hadn’t been there, would that money just have amalgamated to do anything or would it have gone to other places?
Of course it’s a big competition out there to get funding and distribute it, and I did think the Global Fund seemed a bit restrictive. I also thought it was a good question to ask about diabetes, and about other diseases the Global Fund doesn’t cover.
But what was great was that we had an expert who could really answer the questions well.”
To find out more about Aidspan, or to sign up to their newsletter, visit www.aidspan.org .
