Funding to fight HIV among gay and bisexual men, as well as transgender women is just a fraction of what it should be. This is according to researchers from Dutch HIV charity Aidsfonds.
To date, gay and bisexual men account for about one in five new HIV infections. However, they were only allocated approximately 2% of the $57 billion in global donor funding to treat the virus and combat its spread between 2016 and 2018.
Meanwhile, while trans people represented about 1% of new global HIV infections in 2018, programs targeting them received only 0.06% of the total funding.
The Aidsfonds report stated that globally, the total number of new HIV infections hasn’t declined for several years, stagnating at 1.7 million in 2018. This is above the global target of 500,000 per year by 2020, and can even be a reflection of a worsening picture for key populations.
Between 2016 and 2018, the total combined resources for the HIV response was approximately $57.3 billion. In the same period, the total funding of HIV programs for key populations is estimated at around US$1.3 billion.
This means that “programs targeting key populations received only 2% of all HIV funding, even though key populations accounted for over half of all new infections in 2018.”
In 2016, UNAIDS estimated that $6.3 billion was needed for the delivery of comprehensive service packages for key populations between 2016 and 2018. Another $551 million was required for the distribution of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to these communities, making a total of $6.8 billion needed.
And so “there was a staggering gap of 80% between the budget required for HIV programs targeting key populations ($6.8 billion) and the amount made available ($1.3 billion),” Aidsfonds stated.
To end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, Aidsfonds’ recommendations included:
- Increase of funders’ investments towards the $36.49 billion
needed for HIV programming for key populations, over the next decade. - Scale up the proportion of funding focused on community-led and community-based interventions.
- Increase the proportion of funding for advocacy and support to key populations to create enabling environments.
- Undertake concerted and coordinated efforts to systematically disaggregate, track and make public, funding allocation and spending for key population HIV programming.
