The world is at a perilous moment as unprecedented aid cuts have caused the “biggest storm the HIV response has ever seen”, the United Nations has warned in one of the first major reports to quantify the impact of funding shortfalls.
Winnie Byanyima, head of the UN agency for HIV/AIDS, told The Independent that decades of progress had been undone. HIV infections among women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa remain on the rise, while the AIDS-related death toll in 2025 was more than double global targets needed to end the pandemic.
This is all due to the sharpest drop in global development assistance on record, with funding from multiple countries falling by 23 per cent last year, hitting HIV programmes severely.
Byanyima implored governments around the world to stay united and pool resources to continue to fight the global health threat and meet the goal of ending AIDS by 2030.
“There’s no question that this is the most serious disruption in the HIV response since the world came together to fight this disease,” she said.
“The funding cuts, combined with the reduction in civic space and the further criminalisation of marginalised populations have come together to create the biggest storm the HIV response has ever seen.”
She added that this meant we are beginning to see the reversal of some of the gains we had made and “progress in the HIV response is in peril.”
“We just need to keep the global solidarity, everybody in the fight, putting their best foot forward with resources, science and rights.
“It’s just politics that’s stopping us. We can end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.”
Within hours of becoming president, Donald Trump froze the majority of US aid abroad and eventually cancelled 80 per cent of his country’s foreign aid projects worldwide. This decimated funding to PEPFAR, the US’s global HIV response programme and one of the most successful health initiatives in history.
The UK and Europe followed suit, with Sir Keir Starmer announcing this year that Britain would redirect foreign aid spending towards defence.
While infections and the death toll globally have fallen since 2010, initial data gathered in a report launched on Friday show alarming numbers of new infections, particularly among women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are 3,000 new infections a week.
New infections are also surging in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.
Part of this is caused by interruptions to life-sustaining antiretroviral treatment, as well as prevention programmes, which in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa were almost entirely funded by the external aid that has now been lost.
