Winnie Pianima, Undersecretary of the United Nations Secretary -General and Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV (AIDS) on Sunday, warned that President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend American financing abroad could lead to the death of additional millions of AIDS.
The United States is the largest provider of official development aid in the world, with most of the funds via the United States Agency for International Development.
Trump froze the largest part of US foreign aid for 3 months upon his return to his post last January, leaving the humanitarian workers to be confused to deal with the repercussions of his decision.
“It is tragic in many countries. I must raise the sound so that it is clear that this is a large part (from AIDS relief financing). If he stops, people will die,” Boheima told the French Press Agency.
The American decision included a 90 -day comment for all activities of the “President’s Emergency Relief Plan”.
This program supports more than 20 million acquired HIV patients and 270,000 health workers, according to an analysis conducted by AIDS Research on AIDS.
“We may witness an increase in additional deaths by 10 times” to 6.3 million within 5 years, adding, “we may witness an increase in the number of new injuries by up to 8.7 million” in the same period.
The United States has announced that “life -saving treatments” would be excluded from the freezing decision, although the front lines workers in Africa say that the health facilities concerned were closed.
On the sidelines of the African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, it discussed this issue with the leaders and embraced them to shift from foreign financing to the use of local revenues.
But she pointed out that many African countries burdened the debts of some of them “reaching more than 50% of their total revenues,” which depends on their ability to fill the void that will be left by the endowment of US financing.
She explained that “part of the solution lies in pressure strongly in order to immediately and comprehensively restructuring.”