New AIDS emergency: a call to action from the Frontline AIDS Partnership

The Frontline AIDS Partnership expresses our outrage and heartbreak at the US government’s decision to terminate lifesaving support to millions of people living with and affected by HIV around the world.   

As a global partnership of civil society and community-led organisations working across more than a hundred countries, we have seen the transformative power of US leadership in saving lives and strengthening the health and community systems that are vital for ending AIDS and other pandemics. With the recent termination of 83% of programmes funded through US foreign assistance, we find ourselves on the precipice of a new AIDS emergency.   

The UN Joint Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) has warned that without US support, an additional 6.3 million people could die of AIDS-related illnesses by 2029, leaving an extra 3.4 million children orphaned during US President Donald Trump’s electoral term. On HIV prevention, an area where progress is already too slow, we could now see an additional 8.7 million people acquiring HIV. With the Joint Programme now facing major cutbacks after its US funding was terminated, we can also expect a loss of global political leadership on these key areas, and on other elements of an effective HIV response, including community leadership, human rights and gender equality. 

The US hostility to ‘gender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion’ will also decimate efforts towards addressing gender inequality and violence, in a world where 4,000 adolescent girls and young women acquire HIV each week, where 85,000 women and girls are murdered by men each year, and where progress on child marriage is so slow that it will take 300 years to eliminate at current rates of progress. Already, the funding freeze and Trump’s attack on LGBTQI+ people’s human rights are harming the health and lives of key populations, including transgender people, men who have sex with men, people who use drugs, and sex workers.   

This is a crisis on all fronts, and to overcome it, we call for a new era of leadership and collaboration in the global HIV response. 

Alongside the US, we are highly alarmed to see other donor governments cutting aid, albeit less brazenly. Quickly following the US terminations, the UK slashed aid from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP and the Netherlands, Belgium and France have also recently cut overseas development assistance, including for health and gender equality, while Switzerland recently withdrew funding for UNAIDS. These disastrously timed cuts will undermine not only the goal of ending AIDS, but damage health security and global stability as a whole.  We urge these donors to reconsider their aid cuts, while asking countries which have not yet implemented them to resist doing so, recognising that such decisions threaten the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 – and indeed will undo progress achieved since the start of this century through the Millennium Development Goals.  Now is not the moment for turning away. 

Instead, it is the time to dedicate our collective energies into establishing truly sustainable systems towards securing a better future free of HIV, moving away from unsustainable reliance on international donor funding.  We emphasise that sustainability must be grounded in the political and financial leadership of national governments, and we urge them to work with a new drive to rapidly mobilise increased domestic resources for health, as envisaged in the Abuja Declaration, and to scale up innovative sources of financing. At the same time, with the HIV response on the brink of collapse and UNAIDS in danger, the path to sustainability will require evolving collaboration and steadfast support from donor countries, alongside the private sector and multilateral institutions.   

We also demand new willingness from our governments to finally remove human rights and gender justice barriers to ending AIDS, in line with global targets and regional commitments like the Maputo Plan of Action, alongside a new international agreement to address the intellectual property restrictions which for far too long have overridden the right to health and hampered responses to HIV and other pandemics.  

Vitally, a sustainable response must be one that involves close partnership with the communities and civil society organisations that have been on the frontline since the earliest days of the global AIDS crisis.  Since our beginnings, our partnership has worked together to strengthen the leadership of community-led organisations and other civil society groups, yet this new AIDS emergency threatens the future survival of these very actors. We call for urgent and longer-term support from our governments and the international community to enable us to keep our lifesaving services and advocacy going. As community and civil society leaders, we also ask that we be recognised for the central role that we must play in finding solutions to this crisis, and that we are included as equal partners in shaping the new leadership of the future HIV response.   

Together, we are stronger. 

John Plastow, Frontline AIDS 

Raditya Raditya, Rumah Cemarah, Indonesia 

Enow Awah Georges Stevens, Organization For Health in Sustainable Development, Cameroon 

Chynara Bakirova, Anti-AIDS Association, Kyrgyzstan 

Jay Mulucha, Femme Alliance, Uganda 

Amelia G. Frederick, Big Sisters, Liberia 

Bekele Senbete, Organization for Social Services, Health and Development, Ethiopia 

Lucy Esquivel, REDTRASEX, Paraguay 

Job Mutombene, Rede de Ajuda aos Usuários de Droga, Mozambique 

Edgar Valdez Carrizo, Instituto para el Desarrollo Humano, Bolivia 

Patrick Onyango Mangen, Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative (REPSSI), South Africa 

Wilson Box, Zimbabwe Civil Liberties and Drug Network, Zimbabwe 

Pasquine Ogunsanya, Alive Medical Services, Uganda 

Mary Taani, Trans Bureau Initiative, Uganda 

Rachael Kamau, African Sex Worker Alliance, Africa 

Dr. Lumumba Musah, Uganda Youth Coalition on Adolescent SRHR and HIV (CYSRA), Uganda 

Edward Rudram, The Global Network of Young People Living with HIV (Y+ Global) 

Elizabeth Shoyemi, Centre for Population Health Initiatives, Nigeria 

Luann Hatane, Pediatric Adolescent Treatment Africa (PATA), Africa 

Manuel Fernando Condula, UNIDOS, Mozambique 

Amira Herdoiza, Kimirina, Ecuador 

Claudio Pereira, Grupo de Incentivo a Vida, Brazil

Sok Chamreun Choub, Khmer HIV/AIDS NGO Alliance, Cambodia

Simon Sikwese, Pakachere Institute of Health and Development Communication, Malawi

Massogui Thiandoume, Alliance Nationale des Communautés pour la Santé, Senegal

Madiarra Offia Coulibaly, Alliance Cote d’Ivoire

Liberty Matthyse, Gender Dynamix, South Africa