Geneva — Unitaid warmly welcomes the extension of a long-term partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a new commitment of US$ 50 million, bringing the foundation’s total contribution to Unitaid to US$ 150 million since 2006.
In awarding the new grant, the Gates Foundation noted its enthusiasm for working closely with Unitaid to nurture innovations that will bring better access to prevention, diagnosis and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to those who are most in need but live in countries with the scarcest resources. The grant will be disbursed over five years.
Commenting on the contribution, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said: “Unitaid is an important partner for our foundation and the global health community in the fight against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. Their ability to scale innovative health technologies helps improve and save lives around the world.”
Unitaid investments are effective at delivering innovative, high quality health solutions that ultimately benefit millions of people. As countries and partners scale up these innovations, hundreds of thousands of additional lives are saved, reaping huge savings for health systems in the world’s lowest-resource countries.
“The support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping to bring us all closer to living in a world without the three pandemics,” said Lelio Marmora, Unitaid Executive Director. “We are delighted to continue this dynamic partnership into the next decade.”
Established in 2006 by Brazil, Chile, France, Norway and the United Kingdom to provide an innovative approach to global health, Unitaid has since invested more than US$ 2 billion in promising health solutions that partner organizations can then scale up and make widely available
Under a new five-year strategy adopted in 2016, Unitaid will maintain its commitment to the three diseases while supporting a more integrated approach to health, particularly in reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health.
Currently, Unitaid is supporting programs to introduce HIV self-testing kits on a large scale; launching a new generation of state-of-the-art HIV drugs in low- and middle-income countries; developing better treatments for drug-resistant tuberculosis; and working on new treatments for severe malaria and on preventing malaria deaths among pregnant women and infants.
Andrew Hurst, Unitaid, Geneva – tel. +41 22 791 3859, hursta@unitaid.who.int
