World Health Organization urges new deal for people living with HIV. AS Nigeria and the rest of the world marks World AIDS Day, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stressed the urgent need to close the gap in access to life-saving medicine for 35 million people living with HIV.
However, in Nigeria, funding of the national HIV remains a challenge, the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) has declared. WHO in a statement to mark the occasion, described the World AIDS Day 2014 as an opportunity to harness the power of social change to put people first and close the gap. Director General of NACA, Prof John Idoko, in a statement in Abuja, lamented how the current domestic and external funding was not commensurate with the scale and complexity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria.
Idoko said: “On the backdrop of the global financial constraints, the total funding for HIV treatment, care and support has also fallen by 28% in 2010 to $132,870,029 from $185,911,643 in 2008. There is also an overdependence on donor support with only 25.18% of the total HIV/AIDS funding coming from the public sector as at 2012. Similarly, there is limited state government ownership and commitment to the response with less than 0.3% of the total government funding for HIV in Nigeria coming from the state governments. “The consequences arising from the highlighted financial challenges are challenges that affect service coverage, service delivery, procurement, logistics as well as monitoring and evaluation. These are exemplified in the under serving of communities in terms of treatment sites and laboratory equipment for patient monitoring, inadequate human resources, persistent stock-out of HIV/AIDS commodities such as test kits as well as other supportive structures.”
Idoko described the President’s Comprehensive Response Plan for HIV/AIDS in Nigeria (PRCP) as a toll designed to respond to the system and service delivery challenges facing the HIV/AIDS response in Nigeria. He added:“The estimated investment of the PCRP was $1.7 billion (N262.7billion) to be spread over a two year period. Proportionately, 96% of the funds is for the acceleration of the implementation of the implementation of HIV prevention, treatment and care services. The remaining 4% is to strengthen systems and improve coordination of the national HIV response.
The 8 billion Naira SURE-P HIV/AIDS funding for 2014 is far below the approximately 140 billion Naira that was proposed in the PCRP. Hence the present funding is targeted at providing ART and prophylactic treatment for opportunistic infections to 50, 000 eligible adults and children, prevent mother to child transmission of HIV among 15 pregnant women living with HIV, and avail 5 million men and women aged 15 years and older with knowledge of their HIV status.
Funding will be leveraging on the existing systems and structures with active scale up of demand creation activities for HIV services in 8 states that are part of the 12+1 states contributing to 60% of the HIV burden in the country. However, leveraging on existing structures can occur in any of three scenarios.”
