It's politics, stupid! A political analysis of the HIV/AIDS Trust Fund in Uganda.

It's politics, stupid! A political analysis of the HIV/AIDS Trust Fund in Uganda. Afr J AIDS Res. 2019 Dec;18(4):370-381 Authors: Birungi C, Colbourn T Abstract The role of trust funds in the practice of and the policy discourse on the sustainable financing for health and HIV is growing. However, there is a paucity of political analyses on implementing trust fund arrangements. Drawing on a novel meta-framework - connecting multiple streams and advocacy coalition frameworks to policy cycle models of analysis - to politically analyse HIV financing policy design, adoption and implementation as well as insights from public finance literature, this article critically analyses the politics of the AIDS Trust Fund (ATF) in Uganda. We find that politics was the most fundamental driver for the establishment of the ATF. Whereas HIV financing is inherently both technical and political, enacting the ATF was largely a geopolitical positioning policy instrument that entailed navigating political economy challenges in managing multiple stakeholder groups' politics. With the mandated tax revenues earmarked to capitalise the ATF covering only 0.5% of the annual resource needs, we find a very insignificant potential to contribute to financial sustainability of the national HIV response per se. As good ideas and evidence alone often do not necessarily produce desired results, we conclude that systematic and continuous political analysis can bring meanin...
Source: African Journal of AIDS Research - Category: African Health Tags: Afr J AIDS Res Source Type: research