The lack of funding for HIV/AIDS prevention in South Sudan is preventing the country from meeting its targets in fighting the scourge, said Dr. Esterina Novello, Chairperson of the South Sudan AIDS Commission (SSAC).
Speaking during a high-level dialogue on HIV prevention on Tuesday, Dr. Novello emphasized that insufficient financial support from both the government and international partners for the Ministry of Health and the AIDS Commission is holding back progress.
South Sudan’s Revised National HIV and AIDS Strategic Plan 2021-2023 was to strengthen government and partners’ commitment to achieving ambitious national, regional, and global level targets for HIV epidemic control while leaving no one behind.
It also reinforces South Sudan’s HIV and health-related commitments under the United Nations 2016 Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS; the African Union’s Catalytic Framework to End AIDS, TB and Eliminate Malaria by 2030, the Agenda 2063.
“South Sudan is lagging on prevention and this is not because we do not know how to prevent HIV in this country, we do. The reason we are off track again in our prevention targets is due to under-investment in the nation and AIDS response,” she said. “Interventions prioritizing primary prevention of HIV remain minimal and underfunded by the government, donors and partners.”
Dr. Novello added: “Based on the nation and AIDS spending assessment results, the country’s national response to AIDS depends highly on external donor support, which represents 91.7 percent and the government contribution is 3.8 percent and the latter is almost exclusively in the form of salaries for health workers.”
She said the country needs approximately USD 358 million to implement its national strategic plan to end the epidemic by 2030.
“The prevention program is estimated to cost USD 162 million, which is almost 45 percent of the total strategic plan’s resource needs,” Dr. Novello stated.
She stressed that other factors contributing to prevention setbacks include the existence of punitive laws and policies, stigma and discrimination, and inequalities that some people face, especially adolescent boys and girls and young women and men in accessing the life-saving prevention tools they need.
“The purpose of the dialogue is to raise political attention and focus on accelerating HIV prevention and to share an HIV prevention status update with the country’s leadership, donors, and partners, so they may have a strategic focus on how best to accelerate HIV prevention in support of achieving the 2026 National HIV Prevention,” Dr. Novello stated.
For her part, National Health Minister Yolanda Awel Deng said HIV prevention policies need to be reviewed based on the South Sudanese context.
“Our Country is not designed the way the Western world is,” she explained. “We have a lot of population who do not know their status and if they know, you find that some of them have multiple partners.”
Awel said that the policies need to match the local context and that one of the major constraints is that South Sudan’s health budget is just 1.3 percent of the national budget.