Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

UNAIDS and the Kaiser Family Foundation have been tracking donor government assistance for AIDS in low- and middle- income countries since 2002. This latest report provides data from governments for 2011, the most recent year with comparable data available across donors. As it shows, international assistance rose sharply from 2002 through 2008, the period just before the onset of the economic crisis. It then began to flatten and, last year, for the first time, disbursements declined. The current report finds that although funding has gone back up, it remains at 2008 levels. If such trends continue, reaching the UN Political Declaration investment target of $22-24 billion needed by 2015 could be at risk.

The last decade saw a dramatic rise in resources devoted to addressing the HIV epidemic in low- and middle- income countries, contributing to significant scale up of treatment and prevention efforts. In marking the 30th year of the epidemic, UNAIDS recently reported that treatment access had increased more than 20 times and new infections fell by nearly 25% over the decade.1