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Germany refuses to fund the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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Germany intends to suspend multi-million dollar contributions to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, reports Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The main reason cited by the Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Dirk Niebel, is corruption in the distribution of funds allocated to the fund.
Germany annually transferred 200 million euros to GFATM. However, as Sueddeutsche Zeitung has learned, the draft budget for 2012 does not provide anything for these purposes, although Germany promised to make payments until 2013 at a meeting of donor countries in October last year.
Angela Merkel has previously publicly praised the work of the GFATM. The Global Fund, established in 2002 with the active participation of Bill Gates, provides two-thirds of all financial disbursements aimed at combating tuberculosis and malaria, and one-fifth of all funds intended for the international fight against HIV.
For his part, Dirk Niebel, through whose ministry all German contributions are made, questioned the effectiveness of the Global Fund. In a number of African countries where funds from the GFATM are received, cases of abuse and corruption totaling $44 million were discovered.
The government's draft budget notes that Germany will resume payments only if "suspicions of corruption that have arisen with respect to the Global Fund prove to be unfounded."
At the same time, of the 200 million allocated in the 2011 budget, Germany transferred only half to the GFATM, and only after an international expert commission acknowledged in a report on July 1 that the control mechanisms in the Global Fund could be improved.
Dirk Niebel also put forward a number of additional conditions for the resumption of German payments to the GFATM. He insists that funds received from Germany be sent only to those countries where reliable international organizations, such as the UN Development Program or the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), are responsible for distributing aid.
GFATM, for its part, notes that such demands contradict the fundamental principles of the fund's work - not to link payments to any specific recipient of aid. Representatives of the Global Fund and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development will meet this week to work out a compromise solution.
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