Will PEPFAR “Acceleration” Put Its Money Where Its Mouth Is?
Center for Global Development - "In 2017, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) released a new Strategy for Accelerating HIV/AIDS Epidemic Control (2017-2020). The strategy identified 13 “priority high-burdened countries” where PEPFAR would focus on accelerating progress toward “epidemic control”—a point at which the annual number of new HIV infections falls below the number of annual deaths among HIV-positive individuals, implying a decrease in the total population living with HIV. (My colleague Mead Over defined this point as the “AIDS transition” in 2010.)
Yet the strategy did not explicitly promise that these countries would receive additional funding, and the administration’s overall budget request for FY2018 constituted a decrease from prior levels. For outside observers, the extent and likelihood of consequent funding reallocations among PEPFAR countries—and the implications for the countries left off the prioritized list—remained open questions." (Photo: U.S. Embassy Dar Es Salaam/flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)