The UK’s commitment to tackle AIDS is set out in ‘Taking Action: The UK’s strategy for tackling HIV and AIDS in the developing world’. This commits the UK to spend £1.5 billion to tackle AIDS between 2005 and 2008. It outlines how the UK will act to strengthen political leadership on AIDS; to improve the global response to AIDS, ensuring international initiatives and multilateral organisations complement national approaches in developing countries; to support better national programmes, including through our bilateral assistance to country responses; and to improve the long-term response, including through support for research into new medicines, preventative technologies and AIDS programmes. An independent, interim evaluation of Taking Action is currently under way, and we look forward to its findings in early 2007.
Support to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria—the Global Fund—is one of the ways we assist efforts to tackle HIV and AIDS. We have committed £359 million to the Global Fund over seven years (2002-08). This includes £100 million for 2006 and a further £100 million for 2007, subject to the Global Fund’s performance. The UK is now the fourth largest donor for the period 2006-07 (after France, the US and Japan) and the second largest in the EU. The UK’s current commitment to the Global Fund represents around 8 per cent. of its funding.
Since it was created in January 2002, the Global Fund has approved a total of US $6.8 billion to nearly 400 grants in 136 countries. 56 per cent. of this will go to sub-Saharan Africa, 11 per cent. to East Asia and the Pacific, 10 per cent. to Latin America and the Caribbean, and 8 per cent. to Eastern Europe and Central Asia.