The Alliance debates AIDS and health systems strengthening with the UK’s minister for international development
29 June 2006
Health systems strengthening must be linked to meeting the global universal access to HIV treatment target and the UN Millenium Development Goal on maternal and child health. This was the message from the Alliance’s Director of Technical Support, Fareed Abdullah, speaking at a recent event on health systems strengthening and AIDS held at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Warning that spreading new resources for AIDS into a general pot for health systems does justice to neither HIV programmes nor health systems strengthening, Fareed called on the UK Department for International Development to expand its approach to development funding from direct budgetary support to governments to also include additional funding for interventions to meet global health targets. He also called on the US government to invest in the better integration and mainstreaming of its HIV interventions.
Fareed was speaking on behalf of both the Alliance and the Stop AIDS Campaign1 drawing on his experiences managing health and HIV services in the Western Cape of South Africa.
The UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, and Francisco Songane, former Minister of Health for Mozambique, joined Fareed in the debate. They talked about the need for stronger and better-resourced health systems to fight a wide range of health problems affecting people in developing countries, particularly the decline in maternal and child health.
HIV is the main driver of the health service crisis in many countries, as well as the main driver of worsening health status indicators, including infant, maternal and child mortality. Fareed argued that in order to rescue weakened health systems, effective HIV interventions are essential.
Rejecting the notion that strengthening health systems and funding HIV programmes are oppositional approaches, Fareed stressed the need to strengthen key components of the health system to tackle the epidemic, including:
- the role of communities as key actors in health systems strengthening
- the supply chain for medicines
- the production and retention of health workers
- laboratory services.
Fareed went on to describe examples of HIV programmes that, managed well, will have positive spin-offs for strengthening and stabilising health systems. Good examples of these types of programmes include:
- interventions to prevent mother-to-child transmission, which Fareed described as ‘…the only effective way of rescuing child health services’
- effective anti-retroviral treatment programmes, which will reduce the number of hospital admissions.
Fareed concluded by pointing to the lessons many global donors could learn from the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria in its capacity to find the right balance between HIV programme funding and funding to strengthen the essential components of health systems.
1 The Stop AIDS Campaign is a campaigning initiative of the UK Consortium on AIDS and International Development – a group of more than 80 UK-based organisations working on AIDS in developing countries
