GrantWatch on the Blog
New GrantWatch content appears on Health Affairs Blog under Featured Topics. To receive updates, sign up for Health Affairs Today at www.healthaffairs.org under Newsletter Sign Up.
Are Funders Still Focusing On HIV/AIDS?
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) threatens “to derail decades of hard-won progress in the response to HIV” and many other diseases, says a helpful July 6, 2020, CNN roundup article that cites a July 2020 International AIDS Society (IAS) report. CNN quotes Anton Pozniak, IAS president, who explains that social distancing and lockdowns “have disrupted HIV prevention and treatment programs and put vital HIV research on hold.” Also, CNN mentions a June 2020 survey conducted by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which found that 85 percent of the 106 countries it works in reported that HIV services were disrupted because of COVID-19. Bernhard Kerschberger of Médecins Sans Frontières told CNN that HIV testing in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) decreased by 40 percent, and the number of people beginning antiretroviral treatment, by 50 percent, in April 2020. This is because mobile health services have been curtailed—they typically lead to crowds gathering.
In July 2020 the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS released a report showing that donor governments disbursed $7.8 billion to combat HIV in low- and middle-income countries in 2019. This compares with $8 billion in 2018 and “was essentially the same” as the yearly amount a decade ago, despite a 25 percent increase in the number of people living with HIV in those countries since then, according to the report. The funding decline from 2018 to 2019 “was driven primarily by a decrease in [US] bilateral funding.” (That means funding from the United States directly to, or on behalf of, another country.) Also, six others of the fourteen donor governments contributed less in 2019. The US was the world’s largest government donor to HIV efforts, followed by the United Kingdom. The report also notes, “Future funding from donor governments for HIV is uncertain,” especially because of the ongoing effects of COVID-19. Also, congressional appropriations for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) “have been essentially flat” in recent years, and thus “the PEPFAR funding pipeline has diminished.”
In January 2020 Funders Concerned About AIDS (FCAA) published Philanthropic Support to Address HIV/AIDS in 2018. FCAA produces a comprehensive “resource tracking” report annually. Private philanthropy, including 693 funders, gave more than $651 million in 2018. John Barnes, FCAA executive director, comments in an accompanying blog post, “The bottom line, however, is that global philanthropic funding to fight the epidemic remained relatively flat, with only a 2% increase” from 2017 to 2018. “Even this modest increase was driven by relatively few funders and belies the reality of the steady retreat from HIV by broader philanthropy.” Barnes comments, though, that he was glad to see a 6 percent increase in funding for advocacy. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the top HIV/AIDS funder overall in 2018. Other foundations on the “Top 20” list that are familiar to GrantWatch readers include the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom), Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Ford Foundation. Funding for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a daily pill to prevent HIV, increased 16 percent in 2018, and, interestingly, funding targeting people over age fifty increased 627 percent, according to the report. Looking to the future, the report says, “We better understand our task as not just stopping [the HIV] virus, but also addressing the social and political factors that have fueled it.”
Grantmakers In Aging (GIA) released Aging Positively: Bringing HIV/AIDS into the Aging Services Mainstream: An Introduction for Funders in September 2019. “Thanks to advances in treatment, the ability to live for decades with HIV has become a remarkable success story and half of all people in the US living with HIV/AIDS are now age 50 or older,” GIA states in a press release. One program example mentioned is the Aging with HIV Program at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Center for Special Studies, which received start-up funding from the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation’s Healthy Aging program. “The HIV services network and the aging services network are completely siloed right now,” notes geriatrician Eugenia Siegler, program director, in the report. The “program makes geriatric consults available within the structure of an HIV clinic,” says the report, funded by Gilead Sciences. The report includes many ideas for foundations as to how they can improve “care and quality of life for people aging with HIV/AIDS.”
In 2019 President Donald Trump announced his administration’s “goal to end the HIV epidemic in the United States within 10 years,” according to HIV.gov. Specifically, its initiative—Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America—focuses on fifty-seven geographic “areas where HIV transmission occurs most frequently” and aims to cut HIV infections by at least 90 percent by 2030.
Some examples of foundation activities related to HIV/AIDS follow.
Recent Grants
As of December 31, 2019, the Gates Foundation, over the years, had committed more than $4 billion in HIV-related grants, as well as $2.2 billion to the Global Fund, according to figures provided by the foundation. Gates has five focus areas for its HIV funding. Among them are improving retention of people living with AIDS in treatment programs and developing an HIV vaccine. The foundation awarded several HIV/AIDS grants in May 2020. These include a $4,540,720 grant to the World Health Organization (WHO) “to support the WHO’s recommendations and guidance related to HIV prevention.” Gates also awarded a $282,653 grant to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for “research and analysis on the role of stigma” in HIV prevention and treatment programs. In addition, it awarded a $100,000 grant to the IAS for the 23rd International AIDS Conference, held in July 2020. The many other supporters of the conference included the Levi Strauss Foundation and the California Wellness Foundation (Cal Wellness).
The Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) awarded $250,000 over five years for Phase II of AIDS Free Pittsburgh. JHF is also the fiscal agent for this grantee, which aims to reduce new HIV cases in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, by 75 percent. Based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, that “could result in an estimated medical cost savings of $49.8 million by averting 104 new HIV infections,” according to a March 2020 press release.
The Bob & Renee Parsons Foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS (SWC), in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2019. The grant was structured as a reserve fund, so that the SWC could use the money to, for example, buy pharmaceutical inventory and then “replace those funds once the inventory was sold and the profit from the sale realized,” Laura Mitchell, foundation executive director, explained to Health Affairs. This recycling of funds “has created what will be a longer-term, sustainable revenue stream” for the SWC overall. The grant creating a reserve fund helped SWC launch a 340B discount outpatient drug program that enhances services for clients and patients. (The federal 340B program provides drug discounts to certain safety-net organizations and others.) The Parsons Foundation funds organizations in Arizona.
In September 2019 the Merck Foundation launched HIV Care Connect, a $7 million, five-year initiative “to help reduce disparities in access to care and improve health outcomes for persons with HIV living in vulnerable and underserved” communities in the southeastern US, according to a press release. Citing the CDC, the release states that more than half of people in the US who are newly diagnosed with HIV live in the South, and about three-quarters of those people identify as people of color. The initiative’s national program office is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the three grantees are in Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. According to the program’s website, activities include improving “linkage to and retention in high-quality HIV care for populations most affected by HIV,” building “sustainable collaborations” between health care and other sectors to address barriers to care related to social determinants of health, improving health outcomes for people of color with HIV, and disseminating key program findings. The initiative, which uses a community-driven approach to tailor interventions to local needs, also seeks to align its benchmarks with the national Ending the HIV Epidemic plan mentioned above. Later the foundation will fund an independent evaluation of the initiative.
Cone Health Foundation, in Greensboro, North Carolina, awarded $60,000 in September 2019 to the North Carolina AIDS Action Network for its PrEP Project, which aims to improve “awareness, knowledge and health-seeking behaviors” of 1,000 of its members (individuals) and of HIV activists, and to improve policy outcomes, related to PrEP access in the state, according to a grants list. With this funding, the grantee’s goals are to do more advocacy for HIV prevention and for PrEP and to increase its membership. These outcomes are expected to increase HIV testing and PrEP use, and reduce HIV transmission, in Guilford County, North Carolina.
Cal Wellness launched its $5 million Women of Color HIV/AIDS/STI Initiative in 2018. It includes support for two demonstration projects—in Los Angeles and Alameda Counties—that will (1) document and disseminate best practices and (2) develop innovations in prevention and early interventions for women of color who are at risk for HIV, AIDS, and sexually transmitted infections. The initiative also funded RALLY Communications to create Upspoken, a culturally competent campaign that launched in 2018 to inspire and inform Black women to protect their sexual health. Cal Wellness awarded a grant to the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, which will partner with two other organizations to evaluate the HIV/AIDS/STI initiative and the foundation’s Re-Entry and Employment initiative.
Other Funders
The Hilton Foundation has a program area called Young Children Affected by HIV and AIDS, which focuses on improving growth and early childhood development outcomes for such children “in high HIV prevalence communities” in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia. The Ittleson Foundation, a small, national funder, has an AIDS program, which is interested in “new model, pilot, or demonstration efforts” in such areas as prevention and “making treatment information accessible.”
Key Personnel Changes
Jennifer Chubinski,
vice president, research and evaluation, at Interact for Health, a philanthropy in Cincinnati, Ohio, left that organization in July 2020. She is now an assistant professor and director of the Undergraduate Program in Health Services Administration at Xavier University, also in Cincinnati.
Bob Hughes,
president and CEO of Missouri Foundation for Health (MFH) since 2012, will retire in 2021. “Under his leadership, MFH has evolved from a grantmaker to a systems-level changemaker,” according to a June 2020 press release. A national search for his successor begins in fall 2020.
Compiled and written by Lee L. Prina, senior editor
"still" - Google News
September 09, 2020 at 02:57AM
https://ift.tt/2DJMAGo
Are Funders Still Focusing On HIV/AIDS? - healthaffairs.org
"still" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35pEmfO
https://ift.tt/2YsogAP
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Are Funders Still Focusing On HIV/AIDS? - healthaffairs.org"
Post a Comment