Kenya’s AIDS Funds Record Steady Increase over 3 Years
By Ben Omondi
NAIROBI---Kenya’s fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic has recorded a boost arising from the increase of funds the country has attracted to help in financing HIV/AIDS control, prevention and management initiatives over the last three years.
According to the Kenya country report prepared by the National AIDS Control Council (NACC) to the 2010 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS), the amount of resources available for the country’s national response has been increasing in the last three years.
The increase in funding was noted after a comprehensive Kenya National AIDS Spending Assessment (KNASA) conducted by NACC to track actual HIV and AIDS spending from public, international sources – including bilateral, multilateral and private sources.
The study, which describes the flow of funds from their origin down to the end point of service delivery, focused on tracking HIV and AIDS expenditure for the 2006/07, 2007/08 and 2008/09 fiscal years.
The report notes that in the 2006/07 financial year, total funding was US $ 418 million; increased to US $ 660 million in 2007/08 and was recorded to be worth about US $ 687 million during the 2008/09 period.
The report, which indicates that bilateral donors contributed over 70 per cent of the funds coming in to aid the country in the fight against HIV and AIDS, sates that data collection covered public, external and private spending, including funds channeled through the government’s budget system.
The NACC report to UNGASS states that the proportion of distribution of spending by intervention over the three years has not recorded any significant changes, although the amount of spending has increased in absolute terms.
It states that HIV and AIDS’ care and treatment still takes the highest proportion of funds (about 55 per cent) followed by prevention at about 25 per cent, with programme management taking about 10 per cent while interventions targeting orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) takes about 7 per cent.
The KNASA study did not however cover private sources of funds such as household out-of-pocket expenditure on HIV and AIDS, though it adds that this would be captured in the second phase of the assessment.
Most of the key sources of the data in the study were through surveys which targeted development partners, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), public sector, health facilities, private firms and community based organizations (CBOs) while secondary sources were used where data on HIV and AIDS expenditure were not available via primary sources. Also, costing was done to estimate some of the expenditures on HIV and AIDS related activities using the best available data and some agreed assumption.