AIDS Courier (18/09)

HIV/AIDS expert urges routine HIV testing || Are we overspending on AIDS? || Report Says Bank’s AIDS Efforts Are Failing

HIV/AIDS expert urges routine HIV testing

Two influential medical organizations, along with researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have announced they strongly recommend universal and routine testing for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to help curb the AIDS epidemic. HIV infects more than 30 million globally; during last year alone, more than 2 million worldwide died from AIDS, which is caused by HIV.

Are we overspending on AIDS?

Most of the AIDS-related aid projects the World Bank has undertaken over the past 10 years have shown poor success. AIDS projects, though, get about 2/3 of the World Bank’s resources for communicable diseases, and as investment in AIDS increased, funding for other projects (TB, malnutrition, family planning, etc.) has shrunk.

Report Says Bank’s AIDS Efforts Are Failing

A vast majority of the World Bank’s (WB) projects to combat AIDS failed to perform satisfactorily over the past decade, with the ones in Africa, the region at the epicenter of the pandemic, registering the worst record, according to a new internal evaluation. 7 of 10 AIDS projects that the WB financed around the world — and 8 of 10 in Africa — had unsatisfactory outcomes. The projects were typically too complex for the weak or inexperienced bureaucracies carrying them out, researchers found. And coordinating the plethora of donors, nonprofit groups and government agencies involved made delivering results very difficult. The evaluators’ prescription for improving effectiveness is to simplify projects, reduce the number of government ministries involved and tackle more modest objectives.