Row over Global Fund money

A row has broken out between the Tanzanian government and some development partners over the control and disbursement of development funds. "We strongly urge all our partners and funding institutions to refrain from imposing parallel systems outside the government procedures, established by law," the Tanzanian Ministry of Finance said in a statement sent to foreign ambassadors, heads of UN agencies and bilateral aid organisations in Tanzania. The comments follow disagreements over the appropriate channelling of Tanzania's first allocation from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The Global Fund disbursement for a voucher scheme project to provide discounted mosquito nets to infants and pregnant women was initially cancelled, after the finance ministry decided it would distribute the funds. "We are concerned that the mechanism of aid delivery proposed by the Global Fund Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has the potential of undermining government accountability and negate all efforts made so far to improve development partnership and aid effectiveness," the statement said. Local sources explained that while donors and the World Bank have in the past pushed for donor funds to be channelled through the Ministry of Finance to enable tracking and monitoring of expenditure, the Global Fund has insisted, and the government has finally agreed, on Tanzania's allocation being deposited in a specially created account in the Ministry of Health. However, analysts say that in order to avoid such controversies in the future, there will have to be much higher levels of dialogue between the government and the Fund, not least because the amount of money disbursed is set to increase greatly. Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), which, as the Global Fund's Local Fund Agent (LFA), evaluates the capacity of the recipients to use the funds properly, rejected the claims that the issue had done any damage. "It is unfortunate - the Global Fund means well and they don't want to interfere in the government systems. All the they want to do is to ensure that the execution is transparent," Edmund Ndolwa, an auditor at PWC, told IRIN. "Tanzania is one of three pilot countries so there will be a lot of problems at the initial stage. There will also be a lot of misconceptions and these are being corrected as we go along," he concluded.