By: Rachel Kakraba
President of the Ghana HIV and AIDS Network, GHANET, Ernest Amoabeng Ortsin, has appealed to the government to allocate funds to the National HIV and AIDS Fund, in the 2026 Budget Statement and Economic Policy, to be presented to Parliament on November 13, 2025. He said the Fund since its inception in 2016 is yet to be operationalized, resulting in resource challenges bedeviling the country’s HIV and AIDS response efforts.
“In 2016, the government made plans to launch the national HIV AIDS fund, and then it so happened that the government changed hands, and in 2017, a new government came into office. We kept on impressing upon the new government to continue with the AIDS Fund, but we never had a fund. Now we’re in 2025 and we are still making an appeal that without the fund, we’ll not be able to get the resources that we need to end AIDS by 2030”
Adding on “The budget will be read next week, your Excellency Civil Society groups, persons living with HIV, will be very happy to see the budget next week, make a reflection that at least a hundred million dollars has been voted for the AIDS fund’
Mr. Orstin, made the appeal during the launch of the 2025, World AIDS Day in Accra. He said without dedicated funds for response efforts, the target of eliminating the disease by 2030 would be daunting.
“We are all saying we want to end AIDS by 2030, but how do we achieve that if we don’t have the wherewithal”
Mr. Orstin, said the disease continues to have a toll on the country, noting that some thirteen thousand people lose their lives annually to the disease.
“In the last 10 years on the average, we’ve been losing 13,000 people every year to HIV. So over a period of 10 years, we’ve lost about 130,000 people to a disease which is treatable and preventable”
He explained that the decline in the prevalence rate is not necessarily due to successful interventions, but rather the result of increased deaths linked to inadequate funding for HIV response efforts.
“You would realize that our prevalence over the past five years has been dropping, from 1.7, and now we are at 1.4, but nobody is celebrating Ghana’s success in the drop. Why? It’s because the drop is not because of any special interventions we’re putting in place, but because people are dying. So the drop we are seeing is basically as a result of the high deaths were recording because of the unavailability of resources to fight the disease”
Mr. Orstin, reiterated that a national HIV and AIDS fund is a resource that Ghana needs to accelerate the fight against HIV and AIDS.Director General of the Ghana AIDS Commission, Dr. Kharmacelle Prosper Akanbong, said the theme for the commemoration “overcoming disruption, transforming AIDS response” is reflective of current times where limited funding and resources are anticipated to be key factors that could hinder efforts at eliminating AIDS by 2030.
