and why global health needs more funds...

There's trouble brewing in Nairobi as the Government of Kenya seems unable to meet its commitment to increase funding towards health and HIV. Protesters have taken to the streets to force the government to keep its promise on this issue.

Marching along Nairobi's busy Thika Road, protesters waved posters urging Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and US President Barack Obama - who pledged during his presidential campaign to provide US$50 billion to fight HIV globally by 2013 - to keep their promises. Other placards read, "You Talk, You Talk, We Die!" and "Broken Promises Kill!"

Perhaps the Government of Kenya can keep its promise if the moneyed nations of the world, including the President Obama-led United States, can come together and increase funding for HIV and healthcare across Africa and other poor nations of the world. Of course, they will have to stave off the pressure from their own Big Drug, and that has always been a sticky wicket, considering their deep pockets and influential pull across political corridors in most major governments in North America, Europe and even Asia.

Quoting more from the news story:

Demonstrators cited recent groundbreaking research showing that antiretroviral (ARV) treatment drastically reduced HIV transmission among discordant couples as justification for more funding for the pandemic. An estimated 44 percent of new infections in Kenya occur among married or cohabiting couples.

Unfortunately, while the need for the western world's money to flow into research and support of the global effort against AIDS and other diseases needs to grow, it seems to be shrinking.

Two consecutive rejections by the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, flat-lined funding from the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and an end to funding for paediatric ARVs from the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative have significantly dented Kenya's ability to fund its AIDS fight.

The country has put more than 400,000 people on ARVs, but another 600,000 need the drugs and have no access to them; an estimated 1.5 million Kenyans are infected with HIV.

In 2010, the national budget set aside an unprecedented 900 million Kenya shillings - about $10.5 million - for the purchase of ARVs, and the activists said the government's most recent application for $340 million for HIV from the Global Fund had been successful. However, this will still not cover Kenya's funding gap for HIV, which is estimated at $1.67 billion up to 2013.

Trying to look at this issue from a third person's point of view, who is sitting far away from Kenya and belonging to a country which says it has all the signs of being an economic power, I can understand that the Kenyans' first expectation to support the research and funding towards HIV is from their government, but I can't help but note that the Government of Kenya, in itself, it not too strong an entity financially, as a relatively smaller global economy, to make adequate funding towards research and eradication. Now if Kenya, which, comparatively, is one of the more well to do states in Sub-saharan and western Africa, is facing funding trouble, how can the poorer nations of the region be expected to do any better? But as we can see in the world around us, when it comes to the environment and global healthcare, I think nations will just have to buckle up and try to take care of themselves, because more often than not, global promises of support are not met. Now some countries such as India choose not to do anything domestic healthcare despite having resources and power of mobilization, but suffer from acute shortsightedness and lack of will to do anything, but I do hope the governments in Africa will not be so incompetent in this issue.