AIDS Effort Gets $50-Million

A handful of the largest U.S. foundations have contributed a total of more than $50-million to help prevent AIDS in sub-Subharan Africa and help those who already have the disease.

Contributors to the new five-year program include the Bill & Melinda Gates, William and Flora Hewlett, Robert Wood Johnson, Henry J. Kaiser Family, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, David and Lucile Packard, and Rockefeller Foundations.

The new program, which will be run by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, in New York, focuses on preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The group of foundations hopes grant makers outside the United States will join the effort and swell the program’s coffers to $100-million, said Gordon R. Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which contributed $10-million to the program.

“We felt that the size of the challenge posed by AIDS in Africa was such that whatever we could do as a foundation was not going to be enough and we needed to partner with other foundations,” he said.

The program will give money to organizations already conducting AIDS-related work in Africa, such as the United Nations Children’s Fund, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and Doctors Without Borders. The first round of grants will be distributed in March 2002.