African leaders lobbied the Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria for more money on Wednesday to solve a cash crunch but were told a new round of funding was likely to be delayed by several months. The Global Fund, an independent private-public partnership that raises and disburses new funds to fight the three killer diseases, has received pledges of only $900 million for 2005. It needs at least $2.5 billion, officials say. But a fifth round of funding could be "delayed for one, two or five months", the fund's chairman, U.S. Health Secretary Tommy Thompson, said on the sidelines of its annual meeting in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha. "The U.S. is not opposed to the fifth round, the question is when it is going to be. The U.S. contributes 35 percent of funding. If other countries were as generous as us, we would not be in the situation we are in right now," he said. Tanzania's President Benjamin Mkapa, as well as Uganda's Yoweri Museveni and Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki attended the meeting in a bid to convince fund board members of the continent's need for support. Most of the money committed by the fund since it was launched in 2001 has gone to fight HIV/AIDS, which has killed 20 million people in the past two decades. The G8 group of industrialised nations declared in 2003 that the fund should get $3 billion a year, with French President Jacques Chirac proposing $1 billion from Europe, $1 billion from the United States and $1 billion from other countries. Mkapa told board members new prevention methods were fuelling optimism in the fight against malaria, which kills more than a million Africans a year.
