ratified<\/a> by Trump in January included $45 million for UNAids \u2013 less than half of what it received in 2024 under the Biden administration \u2013 offering some relief while highlighting the risk of relying on a large, unpredictable donor. Last week, Washington suspended all HIV\/Aids funding for South Africa over its widely discredited claims of a \u201cwhite genocide\u201d against the Afrikaner minority. Eight million people still live with the virus in the country \u2013 the highest rate of infection in the world.<\/p>\nSunset or reinvention?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s against this backdrop that Guterres floated his proposal to \u201csunset\u201d UNAids and fold its work into other UN bodies like the World Health Organization. The organisation\u2019s coordinating board \u2013 composed of 22 governments, six UN organisations and five civil society representatives \u2013 has resisted. In January, it set up a working group to come up with an alternative path, one that integrates it better into the broader UN system while preserving what makes UNAids distinctive \u2013 the formal role of civil society and people living with Aids\/HIV in its governance structure, a rare arrangement in the multilateral world.<\/p>\n
The working group\u2019s interim report, published this month and expected to be discussed at a board meeting this week, says operation as before is \u201cneither advisable nor feasible\u201d, citing factors including resistance to multilateral cooperation, the decline in international HIV assistance, but also a push for country-led and financed responses. But the report is equally categorical in rejecting the sunset proposal, arguing that a \u201crushed or under-resourced transition risks doing serious damage to the global HIV response and undermining the UN\u2019s credibility\u201d. It further points to the problematic use of the word \u201csunset\u201d at a time when the HIV crisis is far from over.<\/p>\n
Gracia Ross, who leads the World Council of Churches\u2019 HIV, reproductive health and pandemics programme and lives with HIV, says that UNAids closure would be \u201ca big loss\u201d. \u201cUNAids has been a tremendous ally,\u201d she tells Geneva Solutions.<\/p>\n
The options being explored, according to the document, include downsizing the secretariat further, turning it into a \u201cleaner partnership or hub\u201d within the UN system, transferring work to partner agencies or \u2013 further down the line \u2013 a merger with another existing health partnership. A final proposal is expected in October.<\/p>\n
Ross, who will be attending the board meeting as a civil society observer, recognises that changes might be necessary to contend with the funding landscape, but she worries about HIV\/Aids fading into the already overwhelmed programmes of other agencies. \u201cCountries do not always prioritise HIV, precisely because it\u2019s linked to populations that are not a priority and are even targeted and criminalised by some governments,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The HIV community is also suspicious about the motivations behind the sunset push. Ross believes it may be \u201cpolitically driven and meant to satisfy some member states\u201d. She points to the fact that UN Women \u2013 one of the other few UN organisations advocating for gender-related issues \u2013 was also picked in Guterres\u2019s reform plan for a merger with the UN Population Fund. Both organisations are also relatively small compared to others, she adds, making the potential for savings rather modest.<\/p>\n
The US\u2019s foreign aid cuts, which have been widely viewed as the trigger for Guterres\u2019s reform push, have specifically targeted gender-related programmes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The New York declaration may have offered some assurances, with states committing to \u201cfully resource the Joint Programme within the future institutional set-up, and support its current efforts to refine and reinforce its unique operating model so that it can continue to lead global efforts against Aids\u201d. But with the once-ambitious 2030 deadline increasingly out of reach, the gap between political commitments and actions \u2013 and the funding to go with \u2013 has never been wider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thirty years after its founding, the UN is considering shutting down its leading organisation focused on HIV\/Aids just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[16794,65,46820,17586,46819],"class_list":["post-93587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-geneva","tag-budget","tag-geneva","tag-hiv-aids","tag-un80","tag-unaids"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116828516308262539","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}