After weathering the departure of its executive director amidst a misallocation scandal earlier this year, the world’s largest funder of programmes to address HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria is poised to announce a new leader Thursday.

The performance-based Global Fund is a giant in the field of multilateral health financing, channeling 82 percent of the funds for TB, 50 percent for malaria, and 21 percent of the international financing against HIV/AIDS. To date, it has approved 30 billion dollars’ worth of spending.

“They need to do reform 2.0 which focuses on better measurement and accountability on actual disease results,”
Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy at the Centre for Global Development, told IPS.

“We focus too much on paperwork being consistent instead of on what we want the paperwork to achieve,” she said.

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A decade ago, the global community stood together to declare that where people live should not determine whether they live or die when confronted by the scourge of AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria.This act of solidarity – unprecedented in human experience – led to revolutionary advances in promoting health care as a human right. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, along with the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), quite literally changed the course of history. Programs directly supported by the Global Fund have saved nearly eight million lives since 2002 – an average of more than 4,400 lives every day.

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But, while much has been accomplished, much more remains to be done – and the Global Fund needs at least $2 billion to reverse a funding freeze that is in place through 2014. So the world now plays a waiting game to see whether governments will step up and fill the gap.

To be blunt, many of the world’s largest economies are not fulfilling their financial pledges to the Fund. Their politicians cite budget constraints and the need to prioritize domestic programs over fighting diseases that disproportionately kill the world’s poorest.

My country, Rwanda, has been a recipient of Global Fund grants since 2002. Just 18 years ago, our society was torn apart by a brutal genocide that killed more than one million people. Today, Rwanda is a peaceful ...

The world is at a crossroads. Either the global community will join together to fight poverty, resource depletion, and climate change, or it will face a generation of resource wars, political instability, and environmental ruin.

The World Bank, if properly led, can play a key role in averting these threats and the risks that they imply. The global stakes are thus very high this spring as the Bank’s 187 member countries choose a new president to succeed Robert Zoellick, whose term ends in July.

The World Bank was established in 1944 to promote economic development, and virtually every country is now a member. Its central mission is to reduce global poverty and ensure that global development is environmentally sound and socially inclusive. Achieving these goals would not only improve the lives of billions of people, but would also forestall violent conflicts that are stoked by poverty, famine, and struggles over scarce resources.

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