Next Tuesday January 31st, zeGOgroup will be among the crowds, hosted by the European chapter of Friends of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at the Pavillon Gabriel in Paris, gathered to celebrate the Fund's 10th Anniversary. An appropriate opportunity to pay tribute to an institution which in its decade of existence has indisputably become the symbol of a new public health paradigm in developing countries, but there will be a ghost at the feast, that of the recent resignation of the Fund's charismatic - and controversial – Executive Director, Michel Kazatchkine, made public earlier this week and already attracting widespread media attention.
Some have even qualified Dr Kazatchine's resignation an "organized putsch" and "throwing in the towel" (La Tribune de Genève 27th January), while he himself adopts a more moderate tone, preferring to confirm, in his letter to staff, partners and friends currently on the Global Fund's website, his full commitment to the Fund and its mission, citing it as "a force for good [that] has helped to make the world a better place." Reading between the lines, however, the yawning divide that separates him from the Fund's new rigorous risk mitigation policies is apparent, in particular the Board decision to appoint a General Manager specifically charged with their implementation.
As reported by the French newspaper Libération, in an interview earlier this year, Kazatchkine had already condemned this "institutionalization": "Global Fund is ten years old, and is embarking on a period of massive reform", he declared. "Until now, recipient countries developed their own programs and submitted financing requests to the Fund, and we responded based on quality and pertinence."
In the same message, Kazatchkine emphasizes the need to ensure sustainable results of interventions in order to meet development objectives: "The prevailing economic climate poses new and formidable challenges to all international development efforts. In the international political economy, power-balances are shifting and new alignments of countries and decision-making institutions are emerging or will have to be developed to achieve global goals. Within the area of global health, the emergency approaches of the past decade are giving way to concerns about how to ensure long-term sustainability, while at the same time, efficiency is becoming a dominant measure of success."
zeGOgroup fully supports the push toward effectiveness and sustainable results, while insisting on the need to preserve and reinforce the Global Fund model and its founding principle of country and institutional ownership.