Crunch means countries need to rethink HIV/Aids spending

Countries need to be wiser about how they spend shrinking HIV/Aids funds, because of the global economic crisis, a new study has found. The economic downturn has made cash for preventing and treating HIV/Aids increasingly scarce, which means nations should rethink their spending on the disease to make it more efficient, experts say.

A recent look at countries’ national spending on HIV/Aids found the amount countries spent on the disease matched its rate of cases, but often, the money wasn’t spent on the areas that need it most. Researchers tracked how much national and international funding was spent on eight different areas of HIV by 50 countries in 2006. They found that most governments were allotting their of HIV resources in a way that showed they didn’t properly understand the nature of their country's epidemic. Also countries weren’t opting for the most effective, evidence-based approaches. "The global economic recession will force countries to rethink national strategies, especially in low-income countries with high aid dependency," they said. "More than ever, countries need to know their epidemic, and both resource allocations and their HIV programmes need to reflect those data and analyses."

The findings back up calls for countries to tailoring their HIV response to fit their epidemic, to make the smaller amounts of funding they have work harder. Aids experts have recently urged countries to focus dwindling resources for HIV/Aids on well-managed interventions that have strong evidence to back them up. Treatment and care absorbed large shares of overall HIV funding in many countries, leaving prevention initiatives under funded; stigma and a lack of accurate HIV surveillance data on minority groups meant they were most often overlooked, reported United Nations news service, IRIN.

Countries with generalized epidemics (where more than one per cent of the population is HIV-positive) spent twice as much on treatment as on prevention, with about 30 per cent of overall HIV spending going on prevention. Countries with concentrated epidemics (HIV infection is mainly confined to certain groups, such as injecting drug-users or sex workers) often spent most of their prevention budgets on broad programmes that missed the most at-risk. For instance in Latin American countries where an estimated 60 per cent of people living with HIV are men who have sex with men, only 0.5 per cent of funds for prevention were targeted at this group.

The findings from the study, carried out by the Aids Financing and Economics Division at UNAIDS and the Centre for Economic Governance and Aids in Africa (CEGAA) are published in a December supplement of the Aids journal, which focuses on progress in achieving global HIV targets.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children