The global fight against AIDS faces a severe threat, as decades of progress are jeopardized by declining donor funding and the collapse of community-based health services in some of the world’s most vulnerable nations. Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, warned on Thursday that this sudden funding reduction is impacting the HIV response “like a shock wave,” emphasizing that “the world is pulling back just when we need to push forward.”
Speaking to reporters at UN Headquarters in New York, Ms. Byanyima highlighted that many countries lack the capacity to sustain programs previously reliant on international support. As a result, vital prevention and support services are already failing in several places. Currently, 9.3 million people living with HIV await treatment, while 1.3 million new infections were recorded worldwide in 2024.
Ms. Byanyima cautioned that the funding crisis carries “real consequences” across developing nations. Treatment expansion has stalled, and community organizations, often crucial to the HIV response, are being forced to reduce operations or shut down completely. This impact is visible in declining access to prevention tools. For instance, PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), which can reduce the risk of HIV acquisition through sexual transmission by up to 99 percent, saw a 31 percent drop in uptake in Uganda between December 2024 and September 2025, and a staggering 64 percent fall in Burundi during the same period. Furthermore, basic prevention measures like condom distribution in Nigeria decreased by 55 percent between December 2024 and March 2025.
Charities and groups dedicated to HIV/AIDS work are increasingly strained by these funding cuts, leading many to scale back or cease operations. In eight countries where UNAIDS operates, an alarming 99.9 percent of HIV prevention services are externally funded, with only 0.1 percent financed domestically. This reliance makes programs highly vulnerable to aid reductions, a situation exacerbated by “the huge fiscal constraints of the most heavily burdened countries,” Ms. Byanyima stated. The disproportionate impact on women is also clear: in 2024, approximately 570 girls and young women were infected with HIV daily, yet 60 percent of women-led HIV organizations have either lost funding or closed entirely.
Ms. Byanyima also linked these challenges to broader geopolitical issues, asserting that “proxy wars for critical minerals, for energy, for influence are being fought, instrumentalising the rights of the most marginalised people.” Concrete examples of this impact include the closure of most drop-in centers for key populations, including LGBTQ communities, in Kenya, and the loss of at least five similar clinics in Nigeria. In Uganda, 45 percent of programs supporting key populations have partially or fully shut down, while in Zimbabwe, all services for sex workers – including prevention, testing, and treatment – collapsed entirely in 2025.
Despite these significant setbacks, Ms. Byanyima emphasized that scientific advancements still offer a path to eradicating AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. She cited innovations such as “long-acting PrEP, long-acting prevention, long-acting treatments, medicines that we would not have thought about 10 years ago. All these are there.” However, she warned that the combination of abrupt funding cuts and growing resistance to human rights is actively hindering global efforts to achieve this critical goal.
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