The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, the international financing organization founded by Bill Gates, has now uncovered over $73 million in losses due to corruption across several countries. Three recent cases, in Nigeria, India, and Mauritania, has raised overwhelming concern about the accounting practices exercised by the countries that have been receiving grants. For example, in the case of corruption of India, at least $872,000 of the Global Fund grants have been transferred to another corporation and used to rent and renovate an official’s home.
The Global Fund is a highly reputable organization that has saved 7.7 million lives. Since its creation in 2002, governments globally have pledged $28.3 billion. Unfortunately, when a high proportion of the money is sent directly to countries with corrupt governments, the amount of corruption with the funds that has been found is not too much of a surprise.
Unfortunately, with the findings of the millions of dollars that has been lost through corruption, many governments have or considered withholding their pledges to the Global Fund. Germany had initially withheld their pledge of $285.7 million. Without those funds, the Global Fund calculated that to lead to the deaths of 43,000 people. The European Commission and Denmark have still withheld their pledges. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Ireland are also conflicted with a decision about their pledge, and have withheld a proportion of it.
With such a high amount of funds being lost to corruption every year, these countries have every reason to doubt their pledge to the Global Fund as their funds are not being distributed as intended. However, without such funds, many individuals will die due to the treatment that this organization is able to bring to individuals. It is clear that monitoring policies need to be enforced more, directly where the funds are being sent; otherwise an essential financial component of international health will be missing and many lives will be lost to preventable diseases. Unfortunately, such a large change of monitoring policies can be very difficult to instate since the funds are distributed across all different regions across the world.
The article can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/global-health-fund-uncovers-20-million-more-in-losses-through-corruption-in-new-probes/2011/11/01/gIQA0NW7cM_story.html
The extreme dollar amount of loss due to countries corruption is heart breaking. However this does not mean that companies and organizations and governments give up. We must continue to push forward to meet the MDG. However new tactics would be helpful in order to attempt to avoid these large dollar losses.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I would like to commend you on your incredible timing. 11:58, that's awesome.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I agree with Cassandra at this being heartbreaking. Though... sad to say, not surprising. It's not a secret that there's corruption in most developing nations, it shouldn't be surprising that if we hand them money, not all of it is going to go towards what we want it to go towards. There has to be some sort of way we can put money directly into the hands of people who can help those who need it.
It is very sad that all these efforts in fundraising are done in support to find cures and aid those in need and yet the money does not reach the victims. Corruption through government and radical groups are preventing the necessary aid to reaching individuals, especially those in developing areas of the world. The challenge will be to find a way to cut out the corrupted “middle man” and provide relief directly to the sufferers. It does not serve any purpose to raise money to support groups in developing nations if the aid is not received.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I want add comment that you forgot to post the source where is you got the article.
ReplyDeleteI totally with Cassandra and Jeffery, the companies and the organizations should continue to meet the MDGs goal. But it stills a very important issue why the Global health fund probe uncovers $20m in losses. What really happen to that amount of money? That amount of money can help many people in the developing countries. We should make new plans that would be helpful to avoid these huge amounts of money losses again. Of course, missing that amount of money is nothing compared to the good feeling of helping someone in developing countries.