DFID have launched their seven year HIV and AIDS strategy paper, ‘Achieving Universal Access’, which they believe will deliver the UK’s end of the bargain on delivering universal access, pledging £6 billion to improve health care systems and services by 2015. This pledge is great news, ensuring the long term, predictable funding vital to a successful response to the epidemic, but will it be enough?

Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State Gillian Merron specifically mentioned the impact of student campaigners on the shaping of the strategy, and indeed, the priorities for action do answer a lot of the demands the Stop AIDS campaign and Student Stop AIDS Societies were calling for.

Universal access is not limited to treatment, but widened to include prevention, care and support services. The strategy stresses the importance of equality of access, highlighting the need to focus specific attention on vulnerable and marginalised groups – in particular addressing our demand for gender-sensitivity. DFID acknowledge the role that other government departments such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office must play in the implementation and monitoring of the strategy. The paper commits to addressing the critical health care worker shortage which the campaign flagged as being crucial to the response.

However, the lack of an AIDS specific spending target for the next three years puts the government’s commitment to its promise of achieving universal access by 2010 into question. Furthermore, the scope and ambition of the priorities for action contained in the report do not seem to be matched by the funding commitment. The Stop AIDS Campaign has been calling for £2.5bn over the next 3 years for HIV alone. UNAIDS has stated that current global resources for AIDS need to be quadrupled if Universal Access by 2010 is to be achieved . Providing £1 billion a year for Health Systems and Services in general without specifics on how this will be targeted to HIV and AIDS raises concern that it will not be enough to deliver the Universal Access commitment by 2015, never mind 2010.

Further questions surround DFID’s commitment to working with others to reduce drug prices. What this will mean in reality is yet to been seen – there was no reference to our call for the development of a patent pool to ease the production and distribution of life-saving medicines. In the past, Hillary Benn, former Minister for International Development, has said that the UK supports Thailand’s efforts to utilise the flexibilities which allow developing countries to import cheaper generic drugs. The current strategy makes no mention of importing or exporting drugs in this way, an omission which sends a worrying signal to countries attempting to use these provisions to meet their public health needs.

The inclusion of the UK’s commitment to spend £8.5 billion on education is welcome as it acknowledges the power of education as a prevention tool, building knowledge and helping overcome stigma and discrimination. But that £8.5 billion is money for all kinds of education support – how much of it will go on sexual reproductive health and rights? What kind of education programmes will it be spent on?

Whilst there is much to praise in the strategy there are numerous questions to be answered. Many will be answered by the monitoring and evaluation framework which DFID is developing to measure the strategy’s success. This document must be published, and the performance indicators it contains must be rigorous enough to truly test the government’s commitment to creating significant change on the ground.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State Gillian Merron insists that the focus is on results. That’s very welcome, but in order to assess results we need annual impact assessments to judge the effectiveness of the strategy. Without this there will be a lack of transparency on how the UK has maintained its international leadership and commitment to achieving Universal Access. Without published annual impact assessments how will we know the UK is living up to its promises? As the government knows, throughout the transformation of this policy into practice, we will be watching.

Follow this link to read the Stop AIDS Campaign’s official response and see what DFID had to say in reply to our scorecard campaign (not alot).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Campaign News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.