| International News

Despite this crucial role, church agencies are not getting money from The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for their AIDS programs.

The Global Fund, according to its Web site, was created to finance a dramatic turnaround in the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. To date, the Global Fund has committed $5.5 billion (USD) in 132 countries to support interventions against all three diseases.

“Since the inception of The Global Fund, KEC (the Kenyan Episcopal Conference) has not accessed any direct funding from The Global Fund, even after applying to all the rounds,” said Titus Munene, an HIV and AIDS program coordinator for the Kenyan bishops’ conference.

Munene is not the only one frustrated that churches are being shut out of the major international fund to fight AIDS.

The Catholic Church alone provides more than a quarter of all AIDS care in the world, according to Caritas Internationalis. But all faith-based organizations combined have received just six percent of The Global Fund’s money since the first disbursements in 2002.

“It isn’t rocket science to say if 40 percent of the health care is in the church system in Kenya you would think a good portion of (Global Fund money) is going to go to our operational system. But unfortunately it isn’t that way,” Maryknoll Father Ed Phillips told The Catholic Register.

Father Phillips runs seven Eastern Deanery Community-Based Health Care clinics which together constitute the largest single provider of anti-retroviral treatment in Nairobi province. Despite the Eastern Deanery’s pivotal role in running research and clinical care programs in Nairobi’s slums – where HIV-infection rates typically run to one in five adults – the organization has never received a single Kenyan shilling of Global Fund money.

In South Africa, the bishops’ conference which represents South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland has almost walked away from the whole process of applying for Global Fund money in frustration.

“I have sat on SANAC, the South African National AIDS Council, which is also the CCM (country coordinating mechanism) for The Global Fund. It has not been a helpful process,” Sister. Alison Munro wrote The Catholic Register in an e-mail message from Pretoria, South Africa.

More than one in six South Africans are HIV positive, and the church is the largest health care provider after the government. But church bodies have been unable to access Global Fund money either directly or through the South African National AIDS Council, which coordinates South African applications to The Global Fund.

“The Global Fund process is too large and too cumbersome for the churches,” said Sister Munro. “If they (the churches) could apply directly to The Global Fund, some would. They can’t because of the procedures.... The work involved is too much for any church group other than a national structure or a group with lots of capacity.”

Where many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) employ grant-application experts, church-based agencies have tended to regard such functions as wasteful of donor money.

Churches not getting Global Fund money matters because it weakens the fight against AIDS among some of the poorest Africans, said Munene.

A lack of both international and Kenyan government funding has forced mission hospitals, clinics and dispensaries into charging some of the poorest people in Kenya for AIDS treatment and services, while relatively well off people in the cities are accessing free services. As for HIV education and prevention programs, the church needs money to run them on a scale which is meaningful.

“(Fee-for-service health care) means some of the poor cannot access services since there are no government facilities in those rural areas,” said Munene.

The six-percent share churches are grabbing from The Global Fund translates into $325 million spread over five years in dozens of countries. The Global Fund recognizes the number is too low, said spokesman Oliver Sabot.

“Given the essential role that they play in health care in many countries, particularly in Africa, we would like to see the amount of funding to FBOs (faith-based organizations) increase,” Sabot said.

Part of the problem, said Fr. Bob Vitillo of Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican’s most prominent advisor on HIV and AIDS policy, has been that churches have not done enough to fulfill conditions which might be expected from major international funders – making detailed applications for funding and monitoring expenditures to the satisfaction of donors.

“Each of these funding mechanisms comes with its own set of challenges for FBOs, which are more expert in providing support, care, treatment and prevention education than in completing such complicated funding applications and then in ...