Multilateral financial organisations are preventing foreign aid from reaching HIV/AIDS programmes in developing countries, according to an article in the Lancet journal.
In the latest issue of the journal, Ted Schrecker of the University of Ottawa and Gorik Ooms of Medecins Sans Frontieres warned that expenditure ceilings for public health, created by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), disallowed outside investment in their health programmes.
In Uganda, for example, of the $201 million approved last year by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, only US $186 million had been disbursed as a result of these measures.
The journal said: "[The existence of public health expenditure ceilings] reveals the dark underside of the industrialised world's grand rhetoric about improving the health of the poor. At the very least, the World Bank and the IMF owe the developing world an unequivocal commitment that they will be part of a solution to the health funding problem, instead of perpetuating it."
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