Contacts: In Washington Phil Hay + 1 (202) 473-1796 Mobile: + 1 (202) 409-2909 phay@worldbank.org Stevan Jackson + 1 (202) 458-5054 Mobile + 1 (202) 437-6295 sjackson@worldbank.org WASHINGTON, November 30, 2005 —The HIV/AIDS pandemic has entered a new phase, with a greater need than ever for international donors and developing countries to mobilize around common national strategies to better fight the disease, a new World Bank global HIV/AIDS strategy warned today. The Banks says that while there has been an unprecedented outpouring of money, significant advances in treatment, accumulated understanding of how to provide prevention, treatment and care, efforts, along with growing political commitment to stop the spread of the disease, more people will become infected with HIV, and die from AIDS, in 2005 than in any previous year. “The barriers that blunt our collective efforts to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS are a mixture of long-standing, as well as newly emerging, challenges,” says Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank President. “National HIV/AIDS-Strategic plans are for the most part not well-devised with clear priorities; prevention, care, and treatment efforts are still nowhere near equal to slowing down, or stopping, the virus; and progress continues to be eroded by pitfalls in management and implementation.” Launched on the eve of World AIDS Day, the World Bank’s new global plan will strengthen the Bank’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic at country, regional, and global levels, through no-interest lending, grants, analysis, technical support and policy dialogue. The Global Program of Action, which reflects the advice of developing and middle-income countries, international agencies, NGOs, and other groups within the worldwide AIDS community, will help to spur more effective action in several key areas: · More funding for national and regional HIV/AIDS programs while strengthening underlying health systems; · Improving the quality and scope of national HIV/AIDS strategies; · Speeding up work on the ground by working more closely with donors; · Boosting program monitoring and evaluation systems at country level; and, · Sharing the best solutions in policy and practice that have produced results. The global fight against HIV/AIDS has been boosted in recent years by considerably more political commitment on the part of countries and donors, with the worldwide level of HIV/AIDS funding having surged form US$300 million in 1996, to approximately US$ 8 billion in 2005. According to the Bank’s new plan, the Bank will remain one of the major financers of AIDS work in developing and middle-income countries, ensuring that key funding decisions are based on reliable evidence of risk vulnerability, epidemiology, impact evaluation, as well as making sure that HIV/AIDS programs reach out effectively to women, young people, minority, and high-risk groups. 
The Bank will also continue to mainstream HIV/AIDS issues into key sectors such as education, transport, infrastructure, gender, youth, legal and the private sector. According to the international AIDS community, this ability to work across these different fields is crucial to combat, for example, the increasing ‘feminization’ of the epidemic, which needs faster results in areas such as girls’ education, improving economic growth, and reducing poverty. "In this new phase of the epidemic, the World Bank will help countries and donors work together across strategic sectors to roll back this epidemic, and cooperate more fully for greater impact," says Dr. Peter Piot, United Nations Under Secretary General and Executive Director of UNAIDS. "Moreover, this new global program of action amplifies how the Bank will help us all to stand behind the 'Three Ones' approach to eventually defeat this disease." The ‘Three Ones ‘ approach, now widely adopted by the international AIDS community, call for one national HIV/AIDS authority, one national strategic plan and one monitoring and evaluation system. The World Bank says the international community has gained more detailed information about the epidemic than ever before, in its complex march across regions and within countries. The graph below shows how differently the epidemic has evolved in three cities in southern, western and eastern Africa. The Bank says it is imperative to understand local transmission patterns and where communities are vulnerable in their HIV/AIDS efforts, and factor these into fighting the disease at the local level. 
“At the heart of our strategy is an urgency to prevent new infections and to provide care and treatment for those who are infected and affected by the epidemic,” says Debrework Zewdie, World Bank Director, Global HIV/AIDS Program. “The scope and scale of Bank support should be great enough to have a real impact. We will work more closely with others, for a more effective, coordinated and harmonized response. And we must ground our programs more firmly in evidence.” The Bank will continue to provide funding and support to strengthen health systems and national capacity for delivering quality services to poor people, since HIV/AIDS interventions impose heavy demands on the health sector in many countries. The global strategy calls for special emphasis on training health workers, improving important public health functions (including surveillance and governance), procurement, supply chains for drugs and other essential supplies, and sharpening the quality of laboratory and diagnostic skills. “There is an urgent need to do more and to do it better, so that the results of our efforts can be counted in millions of infections prevented, millions of people with HIV/AIDS living more productive, healthy lives, and millions of children, so heartlessly orphaned by the disease, being properly cared for,” says Wolfowitz. AIDS and the World Bank In recent years, the Bank has dramatically scaled up its financial support to countries, helping jump-start expanded programs in many of the hardest-hit places. Cumulative lending for HIV since the first project in 1988 is now over US$2.5 billion, and commitments in sub-Saharan Africa have grown from $10 million annually ten years ago to $250-300 million in each of the last four years. The Bank also provides strong economic and policy analysis which helps countries identify the development implications of the epidemic and the potentially high returns to investments in prevention care and treatment and mitigation programs.
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