To Be Accountable (or not): The Global Fund and US Foreign Aid

Reguarding the Global AIDS fund as part of the President's Emergency Relief Plan:


Having been launched in 2002 with the purpose of dispensing grants to assist in the fight against AIDS (and also TB and Malaria) there are some interesting things that I discovered. According to an article by Tom McClusky (that was posted by Family Research Council) on May 1st of 2003, the House of Representitives passed H.R. 1298, a bill that is also referred to as the United States Leadership against HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria Act of 2003. This bill proposed that the funding to the Global Fund should be increased to 1 billion dollars. Reguarding this bill, in a letter she wrote to the President and other influential menbers of the House and Senate, Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Eagle Forum, a conservative publiv policy think tank in DC, stated "We urge you to minimize involvement with the Global Fund because U.S. influence in this organization is quite limited which makes it unaccountable to American taxpayers. Global Fund proposals are submitted on behalf of a consortium of government, NGO's, foundations, and other entities. The Global Fund is a back-door for groups to circumvent US law and priorities. Very few details details about the first round of funded proposals are available publicly. H.R. 1298 calls for up to 1 billon for the Global Fund. In he name of accountability to taxpayers, this amount must be cut."


Reguarding H.R 1298, (as cited by Tom McClusky) "The house also adopted an ammendment by Congressmen Chris Stearns (R-FL) that would suspend any payments by the US to the Fund "if any employee of the fund was paid a salary that was higher than that pf the Vice President of the United States - $175,000" McClosky cites, in relation to this ammendment, that "The Secretariat's office (the head of The Fund, overseen by The Board) recieves 11 million in salaries and benefits. With a staff of 63 members, this works out to an average salary of 174,603 (just shy of the the VP's 175,000)." Since this is an average salary, some must make more than this, thus violating the ammmendment put to HR 1298 by Rep Stearns. It costs more to run the office of the Secretariat (17.3M) than is given to local Fund agents and operatives that oversee the operations within the perspective countries that the fund is working in (16.4M) (Also taken from the McClusky article). One interesting thing to consider is that if it takes 17.3M to run the secretariat, and 11M of that is for salaries and benifits of 63 employees... The chief trustee of the Global Fund happens to be the World Bank, a organization that has a great history of failure in spurring economic development.


Another aspect of the Global Fund is the Technical Review Panel. They also report to The Board, in reviewing and and evaluating eligible proposals that are submitted to the Fund. Again the World band comes into play here. According to McClusky "it's ineffectiveness is a subject about which both left-leaning protestors and conservative thinkers can agree. Both sides of the political spectrum recognize that when the World Bank gets involved in a country, that country generally winds up worse off enviromentally and economically." This is in addition to the aforementioned position as Trustee of the Fund, for which the World Bank gets paid $2 Millon dollars anually. (No offense to former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz...)


In addition to the WB, there is also the UNFPA, a organization that, again according to the McClusky article, "portrays itself as dedicated to the highest of humanitarian principles. It says that it's mission is to save women's lives by promoting better reproductive health care and family planning. Yet, in many countries, espically China, UNFPA has been complicit in forced abortion and sterilization policies. These atrocities are performed to keep in step with the People's Republic of China's one-couple, one child policy." Further, McClusky states that "In addition to programs in communist China, UNFPA has been accused of assisting in the slaughter of tens of millions of unborn children and aiding and abetting abortion programs in the developing world."


So, after doing some reading I can't exactly say that I think that US Involvement in the Global Fund is a good thing, espically with all that we don't know, but more importantly because of what we do know some of the key players are involved in outside of the Fund (such as the UNFPA acting as the global version of Planned Parenthood). Also, if an organization that the US supports is going to buck a stipulation that the US puts upon it, then what makes that orgaination think that we should be involved with it further. There needs to be accountability for choices made and actions taken on part of this entity, reguardless of the good it may be doing against the AIDS epidemic, because as we all should know, the end doesn't justify the means, espically if there is shadowy dealings going on.

- Taken from a May 2005 Xanga Post