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War on AIDS: 'all cash and no action'
Patrick Leeman. Daily News, July 16 2002. Reprinted courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
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South Africa is awash with funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. However, lack of management capacity, national strategies in their infancy and "shaky" co-operation between Pretoria and the provinces have the potential to result in major under-spending in fighting the epidemic.
These points are made in an article in the latest issue of the South African Medical Journal by the senior news journalist of the publication, Chris Bateman.
The article says that a tripled HIV/AIDS budget reached more than R1-billion this year and rises to R1,8-billion in 2004/5. This is in addition to the R1,7-billion allocated over five years to both the KwaZulu-Natal and the central government by the UN Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria.
The article says treasury officials have, with Cabinet endorsement, gone out "on a limb" this year with unprecedented funding.
Some of it is in brand-new areas like programme management, "step-down" care facilities and general care, as well as tripled funds for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.
However, the article says that past disbursement problems at the National AIDS Directorate, unused allocations by the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), caused by legal logjams, and non-spending by various provinces, are causing concern.
The author says that one of the most glaring examples of recent non-spending has been a R20-million cheque sent to Sanac by the Health Department in 2000/2001 which was allowed to go stale because no legal trustees had been established. The article says a major problem is that nobody at the National AIDS Directorate is sufficiently clinically-oriented to enable HIV/AIDS programmes to be implemented efficiently. |
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