Kenya gets $70 mn HIV grant from Global Fund

NAIROBI, Nov 7: Kenya received 70 million dollars funding from The Global Fund on Monday to fund programmes providing antiretroviral (ARV) drugs to people living with HIV in the east African country, officials said.

Kenya's AIDS prevalence dropped from 14 per cent in 2000 to 6.9 per cent in 2006, but an estimated 1.3 million people are living with the virus, latest government statistics show.

Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki promised in June the government would start providing free ARVs to government hospitals and health centres.

Currently 120,000 people are receiving the life prolonging drugs. But the ARVs in public health centres are not enough and many Kenyans who live on less than one dollar a day cannot afford to buy the drugs in private hospitals.

The three year grant is the second phase of funding from the global body, which spearheads the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

''I wish to thank the Global Fund for granting Kenya the lions share of 29 percent of the total HIV/AIDS approved in this second phase worldwide,'' Kenya's Finance Minister Amos Kimunya told a news conference yesterday..

Established in 2004, the Global Fund is the largest international financier of efforts to control malaria and tuberculosis and ranks among the top three funders of AIDS programmes.

The financing represents a follow-up to a three year million grant that ended this year amid concerns that Kenya had submitted audit documents too late to receive a final 10 million dollars disbursement.

Sub Saharan Africa is home to 14.9 million of the world's estimated 38.6 million people living with HIV and accounted for about half of the 2.8 million AIDS related deaths.

REUTERS