Over $100m annual funding gap might derail progress made in HIV/AIDs fight - GAC warns

The Director-General of the Ghana Aids Commission (GAC), Dr Kyeremeh Atuahene, has called on Ghanaians to support the commission in raising funds to help fight HIV/AIDs in Ghana.

According to him, the country needs over $130 million to cater for HIV/AIDs patients and also help curb the spread of the disease in the country, but it is currently able to raise only about $30 million, which is woefully inadequate.

Dr Atuahene, who was speaking to the media on the sidelines of an HIV/AIDs prevention event in Accra, added that HIV/AIDs medications and medical devices are so expensive because they are imported into Ghana.

“The cost of providing the full range of HIV services in the country is about $133 million annually. Somebody will say this is too huge a cost, and that’s true but it is because the HIV drugs, the test, the test kits, the reagents and other supplies are very costly.

“We import all of them because we don’t produce them in the country and so the cost is very high. The short funds that we have from our donors… is about $31.7 million a year which means that we have a deficit or a funding gap of more than $100 million a year. And so we have to find a way of filling this huge funding gap,” he said.

Dr Atuahene warned that if measures are not taken to bridge the funding gap, the progress Ghana has made in the fight against HIV/AIDs will soon go down the drain.

Watch Dr Atuahene’s remarks in the video below:



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