Ukraine is going to receive a grant from the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria of around $100m during the next five years. Rinat Akhmetov's Foundation for Development of Ukraine, which is implementing its own project Stop TB, will be the principal grant recipient from Ukraine. The Centre for Tuberculosis Control of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, the State Department for Execution of Punishments, the Red Cross Society in Ukraine, charitable foundation International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine and PATH (Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health) will act as the sub-recipients. This has been announced at today's press conference attended by: Tatyana Bakhteyeva, Chairman, the Verkhovna Rada Healthcare Committee; Anatoliy Zabolotny, Director, Rinat Akhmetov's Foundation for Development of Ukraine; Svetlana Cherenko, Chairman, Committee to Fight HIV-AIDS and Other Socially Dangerous Diseases; representatives of the sub-recipients, NGOs and international organizations.

The Global Fund's programme will complement the National Programme to Fight TB for 2000-2011 in the aspects, which the government cannot cover alone: improving the regular and drug-resistant TB treatment quality, ensuring modern diagnostics, training TB doctors, bying second line drugs and raising public awareness of TB prevention.

Tatyana Bakhteyeva, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Healthcare Committee: "This is very important and exciting news for our country, especially in the conditions of the ongoing financial crisis, when the national budget for this year has not been approved yet and the TB epidemics is still undermining our human, social and economic development. TB morbidity had a 2.4 times increase, and TB mortality went up 2.9 times over the past 15 years. Every year almost 40,000 our fellow countrymen contract TB and over 10,000 die. Raising extra funds to fight this socially dangerous disease is paramount for Ukraine in the environment of the financial and economic crisis. Today I would like to express my gratitude to the Board of the Global Fund for their decision to provide this substantial amount to Ukraine, and I would like to assure that this money will be used for the specified purpose under a close supervision by the Parliament.

Anatoliy Zabolotny, Director of Rinat Akhmetov’s Foundation for Development of Ukraine: "I would like to express my gratitude to the entire country for the high trust to the Foundation. This application was successful because we managed to defeat the cross-sectoral selfishness of the past and consolidate efforts of the government, NGOs and international organizations to attain our common objective: overcoming TB epidemics. Why is the Foundation the principal recipient? We are managers; we know how to make money work where it didn't before and how to ensure that every single hryvnia addresses particular problems. We are a Ukrainian foundation – we live here. We are concerned about the epidemiology situation in five years, when the project is over. Therefore, understanding that even this amount can’t solve all the problems, we invest our own resources in the project".

Press release
Kiev
1/03/2010