Earlier this month the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria withdrew its financial support of the loveLife campaign, saying the programme “was deemed not to have sufficiently addressed weaknesses in its implementation”.
The costly, youth-targeted prevention campaign has ignited controversy since its inception largely because of the difficulties of proving its impact. A Global Fund spokes-person reported last week that loveLife had failed to respond to repeated requests to address concerns regarding its performance, governance and financial procedures.
At a time when organisations purporting to be doing HIV/Aids-related work are proliferating and the pool of funding for such work appears to be dwindling, there is a lesson to be learned here.
When groups that claim to represent the interests of people living with or affected by HIV and Aids are unable to provide financial statements demonstrating how their funding has been spent, they open themselves up to accusations of financial mismanagement and corruption.
This could have been avoided by striving for the same levels of transparency in the sector that we demand from the government.
When part of an organisation’s funding comes from public sources, as in the case of loveLife, calls for transparency are louder. But whether funding comes from the private or public sector, the need for transparency and accountability should be driven by the commitments we have made to combat an pidemic that continues to devastate our country.
Our benchmarks should not be how much money we have in the bank but how many South Africans are continuing to become infected with and to die from HIV and Aids. As long as we fail to have a significant impact on those figures, we have a duty to continually justify our existence by openly assessing our performance.
One of our hopes for 2006 is that civil society organisations within the Aids sector will engage in a process of self-evaluation as a sincere attempt to fulfil their obligations to the people they claim to serve.
Susie Clarke is acting executive director at The Aids Consortium