AIDS drive gets $23 mn from Bill Gates

New Delhi: In a bid to provide further support to the high-risk population vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday announced an assistance of $23 million to India for better programme management and technical capacity building.

An agreement to this effect was signed in New Delhi between the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) and the Foundation. "This announcement comes at a critical juncture because of the epidemic's current trajectory which demonstrates the need to scale-up prevention efforts," Union Health Secretary P K Hota said.

Tadataka Yamada, President of the Gates Foundation's Global Health programme, announced that the foundation will invest $23 million over the next three years to enhance the capacity of India's HIV prevention response.

"We are proud to be a partner with the government of India and we are pleased that Avahan and NACO are working together to transition learnings and best practices to bolster the national response," said Yamada.

Avahan is the $258 million HIV prevention programme of the Foundation in India. The focus will be on programme management and technical capacity at the national and state levels, said Yamada, who will spend a few days visiting Avahan's HIV prevention interventions in south India.

NACO Director General Sujatha Rao said the social stigma associated with the disease continues to be a major hindrance in the way of implementation of the programme.

"People are afraid about disclosing their HIV status and it hinders us in reaching to them. This initiative will help us in capacity building and effective implementation of our plans," she said.

The government is providing Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) drugs to 45,000 patients, she added.

"We want to scale the number to one lakh. We have already received drugs that could treat 85,000 patients and we will be sending them to 96 centres. We plan to add a few more centres," she said.

The funds will be utilised to provide support for training of NACO and State AIDS Control Societies (SACS) staff to enhance their skills in project and financial management.

On the technical side, Avahan will provide support to enhance interventions with key populations of sex workers, clients of sex workers, injecting drug users and homosexuals. The funds will be deployed between 2007-2009 and the implementation strategy will be jointly decided by NACO and Avahan.

Launched in 2003, the programme provides community-driven HIV prevention services to those most vulnerable like commercial sex workers and their clients, men who have sex with men, and injecting drug users.

The programme focuses on India's six high prevalence states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Manipur and Nagaland, which are home to 70 per cent of the country's HIV cases, and along 8,000 km of India's national highways.