Malawi’s health minister Peter Kumpalume says government has no money to start funding the national response to HIV with locally generated financial resources.<\/p>\n
His sentiments come at a time when civil society organisations have warned that the country\u2019s over reliance on donors for its national response to HIV is threatening to derail gains made in the national response.<\/p>\n
Reports indicate that HIV resource needs are expected to increase from US$225 million to US$592 million in the year 2020 largely due to the cost of Anti Retroviral therapy against the declining resource base of US$172 million.<\/p>\n
And the organizations in the fight against HIV including the Malawi Network of People Living with HIV (Manet +) feel this trend is enough cause for worry in as far sustainability of the response is concerned.<\/p>\n
They, in the recent past have been calling for new innovative ways to generate financial resources locally for the response\u2019s sustainability, warning Malawi could face a health funding crisis in the near future.<\/p>\n
Among others, various stakeholders have been calling for introduction of levies on goods such as tobacco and alcohol to ensure the national response to HIV is sustained with locally generated resources.<\/p>\n
These levies, according to the HIV financing strategy of 2012, have the potential to generate about 2 million dollars for the response each year.<\/p>\n
The strategy also proposed introduction of Social Health Insurance for HIV\/Aids and institution of an HIV\/Aids trust fund to be run by a management independent from government to mobilise resources locally for the national response.<\/p>\n
But Kumpalume in an interview, while acknowledging that Malawi\u2019s national response is heavily dependent on donor money, said currently the response cannot work without donor support.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think Malawi will face a health financing crisis in 2020 suffice to say at the moment we just don\u2019t have the money to support ourselves, but as a government, as a people we really need to sit down and see how we can increase funding from within\u201d, Kumpalume said.<\/p>\n
He also said so far government has not embarked on any specific activity aimed at mobilizing local resources to fund the national response.<\/p>\n
\u201c Frankly at the moment we don\u2019t have the money and we are not involved in any activity to that end, what we are doing is looking at the whole health funding model to see how we could increase funding, of course when it comes to funding, this is a ministry of finance issue,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kumpalume also said the question of how and where local financing could come from is a long term plan as at the moment Malawi cannot do without donor support.<\/p>\n
A policy brief on HIV financing crisis in Malawi released by the Journalists Association against Aids (Journaids) earlier this year expressed scepticism with tobacco levy as a means to finance Malawi\u2019s HIV response.<\/p>\n
\u201cTaking into serious consideration of the growing international anti smocking campaigns championed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) any hopes of taping resources from tobacco levy are quickly fading as tobacco prices continue to decline,\u201d reads part of the statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malawi’s health minister Peter Kumpalume says government has no money to start funding the national response to HIV with locally generated financial resources. His sentiments come at a time when civil society organisations have warned that the country\u2019s over reliance on donors for its national response to HIV is threatening to derail gains made in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}