Panel Urges Tough Global Fund Financial Safeguards

An independent panel said today the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria must streamline and strengthen its internal financial controls.

The Global Fund convened the panel in March to address donor concerns about mismanagement and alleged fraud. Since its founding as a way to speed delivery of donors’ contributions to the nations hit hardest by the diseases, the Global Fund has become what the panel calls the largest and most important anti-poverty initiative so far this century. More than 600 programs in 150 nations are supported by the fund.

But a number of health ministers and other senior government officials view Global Fund grants “as someone else’s responsibility,” the panel said in its review. The fund’s secretariat “has bred a culture of passivity in grant management.”

Former US Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, who co-chaired the panel along with former Botswana President Festus Mogae, called the report “sobering and optimistic.” “It makes clear that the Global Fund has to shift now from an organization that was responding to an emergency to one that is capable of a sustained response. And it lays out a road map for that change,” said Leavitt.

In all, the panel suggests six sets of general recommendations, ranging from cutting risk and paring down internal committees to eliminating bureaucracy.

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