Stridsemnet er det kinesiske styres ønske om at bestemme, hvilke NGOer der skal have penge til kampen mod bl.a. hiv/aids
NEW YORK, 21 May, 2011: The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has frozen payments on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of disease-fighting grants to China, one of the charity’s biggest recipients.
The reason is a dispute over China’s management of the grants and Beijings hostility toward involving grass-roots organizations in public health issues.
The dispute may add to a growing debate among global health experts whether China, which spent an estimated 46 billion US dollar staging the 2008 Olympic games and last year’s Shanghai Expo and financed a 586 billion dollar economic stimulus package, should be a recipient of such aid at all.
The fund, which has expanded to 150 countries since it was founded in 2002 as a pool for public and private donations to fight the world’s worst diseases, quietly decided to hold back payments from a major AIDS grant to China in November.
It froze payments from other grants to China several weeks ago because of fresh concerns over lack of monitoring of funds.
Its decisions appear rooted in a collision between the fund’s conviction that grass-roots organizations must be intrinsically (meget nær) involved in the fight to control diseases like AIDS, and the Chinese government’s growing suspicion of any civil-society groups that are not directly under its control.
They follow complaints by some AIDS activists that Chinese officials have sought to suppress their public-health activities, have shunted (skubbet/overført) grant money to groups under government control and have failed to account for how some funds were spent.
At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars for programs to reduce the incidence of tuberculosis, prevent and treat HIV- infections and wipe out malaria.
China has received 539 million dollar from the Global Fund since 2003, according to the fund’s Web site. An additional 295 million is in the pipeline, making China the fund’s fourth largest recipient behind Ethiopia, India and Tanzania, one global health expert said.
Kilde: The Push Journal
