Delivered by Jules Kim, Asia and the Pacific Delegate, on behalf of the NGO Delegation

I make this statement on behalf of the NGO Delegation

The world is on the brink of an event horizon of crises: health vs disease & death; human development vs enveloping poverty; human rights vs viscous persecution; gender equality vs a war on women; and climate disaster vs common action for a sustainable planet.

The United Nations, flawed and imperfect as it is, is the best system we have invented for steering our common agenda to a survivable sustainable future rather than one of war, death and planetary destruction. And the Joint Programme, UNAIDS, flawed and imperfect as it is, is the very best vehicle we have invented for our collective struggle to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.

Now is not the time for brinkmanship. For preventing good in the name some imagined perfect. For politics. For playing with millions of lives of people living with and affected by HIV. The world cannot afford for the HIV response, so recently agreed in the High Level Political outcome and the new Global AIDS Strategy, to fail. The world, and in particular our key populations and communities, needs the HIV response; the HIV response, for now perhaps, needs UNAIDS; and UNAIDS needs to be fully funded in order to succeed. It really is this simple.

Yes sure, the response is a global responsibility. But member states sitting in this room, here today, have the data, the knowledge, and the resources to fund UNAIDS, and to ensure its success. We hope, on behalf of all of civil society that you have the political leadership to do so.

A day or two ago young climate activists in Glasgow said, “No more blah, blah, blah”. We don’t think that anything that happens in the joint Programme is blah blah blah. But we do think this brinkmanship on fully funding the budget, is unwarranted, dangerous, and self-defeating to the SDGs more broadly. Funding UNAIDS is a sound investment for donor countries. It produces multiple returns on investment in areas as wide as inequality, gender equality, global heath & health security, and adolescent health and national development of member states.

We urge you, no we beg you, on behalf of our communities. Let us all again step up and put money where our mouths are. Please. Fully fund this UBRAF.

I thank you.

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Delivered by Violeta Ross, Latin America and the Caribbean Delegate, on behalf of the NGO Delegation

We are having a dialogue on HIV funding but we are not just anybody, we are the Joint United Program for HIV/AIDS-UNAIDS, the global body for HIV policy making. Nevertheless, we also need to be reminded of what this dialogue means in the real world and this is my reflection for today and especially how this dialogue becomes real for us people living with HIV and for key populations groups.

These days I visited different cities in Bolivia, some more rural than others. I had several meetings to explain the content of national and municipal HIV laws and asked the specific question of how much budget lines for HIV have these laws produced or not.

My learning from these last months is that an HIV law or a policy can only be as a good as its budget line. A budget line is the only way of making this sustainable, accountable and traceable.

The dialogue we are having now, can remain as another zoom meeting unless we make it real with budgets and I mean budgets for the regional and national HIV responses too, we need something concrete that communities can use and implement.

Even more in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, HIV continues to be sent to the oblivion (the land to forget).

As the Joint Program, we have the responsibility to put HIV back in the global development agenda, but not only with speeches in the World AIDS Day, but with budgets. Every World AIDS Day, local health authorities in Bolivia make campaigns of solidarity and speak about condom use, we people with HIV continue to ask the question: How much HIV budget have you planned for next year? And that is the same question I ask all of us.

And please, allow me to remind all of us of the call of the NGO Delegation:

• A fully funded UBRAF.
• A fully funded UNAIDS.
• A fully funded HIV/AIDS response.

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The zero draft of the 2022-2026 Unified Budget, Results and Accountability Framework (UNAIDS) for the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) is now available. The document is set to be approved by the PCB members during its upcoming 48th meeting. The UBRAF will set out the Joint Programme's actions to support the Global AIDS Strategy's implementation. The final framework, workplan and budget are scheduled to be presented and approved by the PCB during a special session in September 2021. And the indicators for the new UBRAF will be presented and proved by the PCB on its 49th regular meeting in December.

Tags: 48th PCB Meeting

Delivered by Andrew Spieldenner, North America NGO Delegate

Thank you, Chair.

The NGO Delegation acknowledges the new format for UBRAF. Even though the information is spread out across several reports, it is easier to find the kind of information you need.

What does financial reporting have to do with Civil Society? Quite simply, it gives us a way of seeing how resources are accrued and spent in the UNAIDS context. We see some of the politics of resourcing at UNAIDS and where there are shortfalls. And civil society suffers in these shortfalls.

As our delegation has said over and over again, we need to restore full funding to the UNAIDS UBRAF as crucial for leveraging the full potential of the Joint Programme and accelerating progress towards the goal of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Without full funding, this goal will remain a mirage in the distance. But, besides doing the housekeeping and restoring the UNAIDS credibility among donors, we need to lead UNAIDS to a sustainable and secured financial situation. At the heart of it, we assume we all share the vision that the HIV response remains a critical issue for our time.

We do note that there remains a lack of clarity in monitoring mechanisms for tracking resources involving community-led responses. When we see such little funding going to gender and gender-based violence, as well as stigma and anti-discrimination efforts, we wonder at how we reach a discrimination and stigma-free world.

The NGO Delegation urges the Joint Programme and Member States to increase the investment in civil society and community-led initiatives and their involvement in decision making. After the meetings last week on target setting, UNAIDS is well on its way to developing a classification for community-led work, and we look forward to seeing the results of these meetings, as well as how UNAIDS can support Member States to resource community-led efforts regionally and locally.

We also are cautious about the challenges faced by middle-income countries and the country transition plans. Country transition plans must take into account the political landscape on the ground. In places where conservatism is on the rise, key populations and women and girls rely more and more on civil society networks and organizations to find support and access to key services. And in these contexts, civil society is actively being defunded and restricted. We have an intimate understanding of where the shortfalls are in the field: we have to survive in them. Advocacy and human-rights efforts must be upheld in order for key populations and women and girls to thrive. In the 68 countries that criminalize homosexuality, for instance, where do you imagine I would go to get my HIV care that would be safe and free of stigma and discrimination?

Tags: 44th PCB Meeting, UBRAF