A Cause for Concern

*This article was originally published on the Alliance website.

In our report, published in the lead up to World AIDS Day 2018, Funders Concerned About AIDS (FCAA) finds that HIV/AIDS-related giving among private philanthropic organisations decreased by five per cent ($37 million) from 2016 to 2017. At $638 million, this is the lowest amount of disbursements since 2014.

This decrease was driven largely by two factors: (1) decreases in funding by the majority of funders, and (2) continued concentration of funding among a small set of organisations. In 2017, 88 per cent of total funding came from the top 20 funding organisations.

On its own, this trend may not look all that alarming. However, it should be considered in the broader global context.

At our recent AIDS Philanthropy Summit, FCAA members focused a great deal of attention on ill-advised policies, such as the U.S. government’s Global Gag Rule^[1], that threaten to harm international HIV and family planning efforts. In addition, for the past two years, the Kaiser Family Foundation has reported declining donor government funding for HIV and AIDS.^[2] Though there was an increase in the 2017 report, it is an anomaly driven by the timing of the US’s contribution and is not expected to continue. In fact, eight of 14 governments decreased resources toward the fight. Further, UNAIDS estimates that $26.2 billion will be needed annually by 2020^[3] to achieve the global target to end AIDS as a public health threat by the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals’ deadline. This leaves a roughly $6 billion gap between available resources and need.

Read the full article here.