South Africa’s influential HIV and Aids campaign group is struggling to recover from a sharp decline in international funding.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which led the fight against Aids denial in South Africa and forced the government to create the world’s largest treatment programme, has been hit hard as donor countries have scaled back on grants to NGOs involved in HIV and Aids programmes. Even after making significant staffing cuts, it has yet to raise the R35m (£1.6m) it says it needs to meet its running costs for the next financial year.
“The global donor community, which was critical to supporting organisations like the TAC throughout the 2000s, has moved on to other issues. It mistakenly considers the HIV epidemic globally to be under control, and therefore there has been a serious recession in developed country funding to civil society organisations,” said Mark Heywood, TAC co-founder.
This could spell disaster for South Africa’s treatment programme, said Heywood. “The fact is that the sustainability of a quality response to HIV depends on the TAC, because it needs community activism to continue to demand accountability and spot the weaknesses in the health system.”
Although huge progress has been made since the height of the epidemic in 2000, HIV and Aids remains a major public health crisis in South Africa. According to the government, an estimated 6.2 million South Africans live with HIV, but only 2.7 million are taking antiretroviral medication.
Stephen Lewis, a former UN special envoy for Aids in Africa, said the TAC still has a vital role to play in improving these statistics. On 20 November, his foundation promised to match fund donations to TAC up to a total of $1m.
“It is a bitter irony to recognise that on World Aids Day, 1 December, the premier organisation in the fight against HIV/Aids is in desperate financial straits,” said Lewis, who has previously described the TAC as the “spiritual leader” of HIV activism.
“Without the TAC’s brilliant, principled, unswerving interventions, millions would have died, and millions would not now be in treatment. They took on a government in denial and forced it to completely reverse policy. If there’s any justice in this world, the international community of funders will fill the TAC’s coffers to overflowing.”
TAC’s secretary general, Anele Yawa, welcomed the pledge, and said the organisation would have to look beyond government funding to find new donors. “The fight against HIV and Aids, it does not only need governments. It needs a collective approach. So we need to rally around our cause and mobilise our communities,” he said.
Yawa added that for the TAC to be able to do its best work, it needed guaranteed funding for a three- to five-year period.
The cash injection from the Stephen Lewis Foundation will come too late to save dozens of jobs, as the organisation has already embarked on a programme to retrench staff and cut back on infrastructure.
In November 2014, the UK’s Department for International Development withdrew funding worth more than R8 million (£370,000) from the TAC. “The TAC has done important advocacy work for people living with HIV, but the ending of UK support will not reduce South Africans’ access to treatment,” said a spokesperson at the time. “South Africa has made enormous economic progress over the past two decades and it is right that our relationship had changed from one of aid to one of mutual co-operation and trade.”
