One of the objectives of the three-day high-level meeting between the Government and the financial organization, which mobilizes resources to combat diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, was the signing of a new framework agreement between the Global Fund and Angola, which ended up not materializing.
At the end of the meeting, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Manuel Augusto, pointed out that the meeting was “results-oriented and unquestionably successful”, despite the fact that the signing of the agreement was not completed, which he attributed to “objective and perfectly understandable reasons, taking into account the time that the technicians had to work in their negotiation”.
As for the remaining objectives, including the review of the mechanisms for coordinating and managing the funds and the review of the Government's counterpart mechanisms and the sustainability of the actions, the minister considered that they had been achieved, as demonstrated in the Roadmap for Access to the Allocation Letter (provision of financial resources) approved by the parties.
The Global Fund, an international financial organization almost entirely financed with contributions from donor countries and the private sector, which has had a strategic partnership with Angola since 2005, has so far provided more than 200 million dollars for the treatment of the three diseases, including contributions for medicines, technical assistance and diagnosis.
"It was important to have this meeting to exchange views and make a deep reflection on current and future grants", said the Minister of Health, Sílvia Lutucuta, stressing that the Angolan Government showed "political commitment and willingness to comply with the rules and regulations of the Global Fund”.
The roadmap, he added, includes activities “concrete to develop in the short term”, preparing Angolan authorities “for grants in the next cycles”.
The interventions will be aimed primarily at primary health care, said the minister, indicating that the amount of the next grants has not yet been defined.
"We have a period of almost five months to prepare all these requirements and in May we will have our bases and the necessary documents for the next grant", he stressed.
Asked about the financing control mechanisms, after in 2018 Sónia Neves, financial manager of the Global Fund's Technical Management Unit, and Milton Saraiva, program employee, were convicted of embezzlement of funds earmarked for the Malaria Program, Silvia Lutucuta guaranteed that currently there are no problems of this nature.
"In fact, there was a deviation (...), but administrative and judicial measures were taken and immediately the Ministry of Health and the Global Fund defined mechanisms for greater control to maintain rigor and transparency", he declared.
The organization's chairman, Donald Kaberuka, said that the objective of the meeting was to “re-dynamize the relations between Angola and the Global Fund”, with a roadmap that made him “confident” in the progress of the fight against the three diseases.
