Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - October 6, 2004
Funding the fight: The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria awarded Uganda a new grant of $70-million last Friday to battle the disease and expand life-prolonging therapy with anti-retroviral drugs.
Mary Muduuli, Deputy Secretary in the Ministry of Finance who signed the agreement on behalf of Uganda's government, said the new funding would not just be used for buying anti-retrovirals.
"Among others, the money will be used on activities to prevent the spread of the virus, provide seed money to people living with HIV/Aids and to monitor drug resistance to anti-retroviral drugs," she told a news conference in the capital, Kampala.
The grant means the Geneva-based fund has now approved more than $270-million in funds for Uganda.
The government says about 1,2-million Ugandans are infected with HIV, and doctors say about 100 000 have Aids and would benefit from drug treatment.
Last week a Ugandan support group for people living with the disease questioned the country's much-acclaimed official statistics, saying the real prevalence of the virus was higher than the 6% claimed by the government.
The Global Fund was set up in 2002 as the brainchild of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, but the public-private partnership is not part of the UN bureaucracy.
The fund has committed $3-billion to more than 300 programmes in 128 countries, of which $500-million has been disbursed.
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