Latin America and Caribbean Constituency of the Global Fund Board Responds to Global Fund Executive Director’s Report

(PANCAP Coordinating Unit, CARICOM Secretariat) Senator The Honourable Mary Isaac, Minister of Health and Wellness, Saint Lucia and Board Member, Latin America and Caribbean Constituency of the Global Fund Board responded to the Global Fund Executive Director’s report at the 42nd Meeting of the Global Fund Board, Geneva, Switzerland on 14-15 November 2019.

“LAC thanks the Executive Director for his second annual report to the Board and congratulates him and all partners for a successful replenishment.

We look forward to delivering results with these funds and wish to underscore the need to protect components that experienced large reductions. Given the large number of reduced components currently foreseen, even within the higher scenario, qualitative adjustments will be critical to ensure that reductions are not too sudden or too steep. These adjustments should include regional contextual factors to capture potential risk of resurgence as experienced with other disease elimination as well as considerations for sustainability and transition.

We support his view that “we make better progress on reducing mortality than on reducing incidence’. Saving lives is essential, but to end the epidemics, and thus save countless future lives, we also must scale up effective prevention. We therefore encourage the Global Fund Secretariat to take this into consideration as we prepare to allocate resources to countries that are expected to deliver results with reduced funding while our governments continue to fill the gap in funding to prevent resurgence. Furthermore, we need to find innovative approaches and create innovative Global Fund allocation mechanism specific for countries “ending the epidemic”. We welcome the thrust to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

We believe that the Global Fund should support countries to strengthen collaborative approaches by ministries of health and finance to identify and exploit synergies for cross-sectoral financing and to direct domestic resources to institutionalize Civil Society Organizations’ (CSOs) efforts under national programmes.

We would like to acknowledge the successful implementation of the Venezuela grant and the monitoring support provided by CSOs. We appreciate the award of a second grant and the decision regarding Venezuela’s eligibility for a Malaria grant from 2020. We call on all partners to support and fund the master plan”.

Source: CARICOM TODAY