|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…
|
Staff Writer
The Disaster and Environmental Management Trust (DEMT) recently attended the UN High-Level Meeting on TB 2023 in New York which gave the organization the opportunity to directly interact with the Zimbabwe Country Delegation and reiterated the need for increased TB investments and national budget allocation for national TB response.
This comes as TB remains the world’s deadliest infectious killer. Each day, over 4,000 people lose their lives to TB, and close to 30,000 people fall ill with this preventable and curable disease.
Global efforts to combat TB have saved an estimated 58 million lives since the year 2,000. In Zimbabwe, it is estimated that about 30 000 people fall ill with TB each year and about 4,600 of these, die.
DEMT Head of Programmes, Romeo Chingezi, who was one of the participants at the UN High-Level Meeting on TB 2023 in New York, said the engagements succeeded in securing this highest political participation for Zimbabwe.
“We lobbied the President and country delegation to endorse the bold political declaration on TB, adopted at the UN,” said Chingezi.
“Despite initial reservations expressed by the government of Zimbabwe to attend this meeting, our advocacy efforts were successful as Zimbabwe endorsed the UN political declarations, thereby ensuring the country’s commitment to addressing TB.
“Our advocacy work at the UN reached its pinnacle when the President of Zimbabwe made commitments to Address TB during his speech. The President’s commitments represent a vital step forward in holding the Government of Zimbabwe accountable on a domestic level.”
Chingezi added that efforts should now focus on planning how to lobby the Government of Zimbabwe to implement these commitments at the National level.
According to the Stop TB Partnership, a network of international organisations established in 1998 to help end TB as a public health problem, funding for TB research and development (R&D) has remained flat since 2018.
Global funding for tuberculosis (TB) research totalled 915 million US dollars in 2020 – less than half the goal of 2 billion US dollars set forth by participating country governments at the 2018 UN-HLM-TB.
In 2021, TB had a funding gap of 13 billion US dollars globally, with only 5,3 billion US dollars available for its programmes.
It experienced a drop in funding amounting to 500,000 US dollars in 2020 as many countries took money away from TB to respond to COVID-19.
A new report, Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends, 2005–2020 by Treatment Action Group (TAG) and the Stop TB Partnership, found that TB received less than 1 percent of the amount invested in COVID-19 Research and Development over the first 11 months of the pandemic.