HIV funding cuts risk 'unravelling decades of progress', global health experts warn
Global health experts warn that an 18% decline in external funding for HIV programs in 2025 threatens to reverse decades of progress in prevention and treatment. The withdrawal of major donors like USAID has led to immediate service cuts and job losses in low- and middle-income countries.
Why it matters
Abrupt funding shifts in global health infrastructure can lead to the collapse of essential community-led services, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations.
The recent cuts in the global HIV response threaten to unravel decades of progress, highlighting the need for moving beyond donor dependence, global health experts warn. These cuts are severely impacting HIV prevention, testing and key components of treatment programmes, such as the range of community-led services that reach the people most affected by HIV, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said in a new report. Prevention programmes have historically relied heavily on donor assistance in most regions. But in 2025, external financing for the global HIV response in low- and middle-income countries fell by 18% compared with 2024, the largest decline in international HIV resources in almost 20 years.“The donor funding allowed us to get to where we are now,” Mwelwa Phiri, expert in HIV/AIDS at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine and Zambart in Zambia, told Euronews Health.
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