Women volunteers gather in Zambia - Photo UN
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Amid concerns of corruption in the management of public health grants in Zambia, the Geneva-based Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has stopped disbursing funds to the country’s Ministry of Health.
On a written statement, the Global Fund confirmed it had stopped disbursing funds to Zambia since August 2009 after finding “evidence of expenditures that could not be accounted for.”
In order not to disrupt services, the Global Fund channeled $17 million through other venues, and soon, the UN Development Programme, UNDP, will take over the Ministry of Health’s grants.
An additional $180 million in grants implemented by civil society organizations in Zambia are not affected by the freeze.
Danger sign for landmines
Updated 17:20 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The goal of the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-free World, meeting in Colombia 29 November to 4 December, is to eradicate the suffering caused by anti-personnel mines once and for all.
Colombia has had the dubious distinction until recently of being the country with the most casualties from anti-personnel mines. It was overtaken by Afghanistan in 2009. Colombia alone counts 8,081 casualties of landmines since 1990, but it also has 6,285 survivors, people who have lost a limb. Landmines caused almost 5,200 casualties worldwide in 2008, one-third of them children. The 2009 Landmine Monitor Report points out that deaths from landmines are steadily decreasing, down from an average of 7,300 a year for the previous 10 years. Landmine ban groups are keen to get rid of the mines but they are also focusing more on helping survivors.
In Colombia, too, the number of casualties has been falling: 777 deaths in 2008, compared to 895 the previous year.
In Colombia, rebel groups such as Farc and the ELN, as well as paramilitary groups, have planted anti-personnel mines on an estimated 60 percent of the territory. Insurgents increasingly finance themselves through the drugs trade, reported Human Rights Watch in a section on Colombia in its World Report 2009, published in January. They have been invading peripheral regions in the south of the country on the border with Ecuador, ejecting the indigenous populations, and protecting their territories from army incursions by the simple means of sowing anti-personnel mines, many home-made and attractive to children.
