adminIn their wisdom and foresightedness, our policymakers realised that it was not sustainable in the long run to depend on interventions from the donor community to fight the disease, hence the decision to come up with the National Aids Trust Fund.
Under the fund, commonly known as the Aids Levy, workers contribute three percent of their income tax to the fund and the money is used in the fight against HIV and Aids, including the procurement of life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs.
However, despite the fund having been in existence for more than 20 years, Zimbabwe is still heavily reliant on donor funding in the execution of the fight against HIV.
There is nothing wrong with accepting donor assistance if it complements our strategies and not the other way round.
A story carried in yesterday’s issue of Chronicle exposed the dangerous effects of depending on the donor community for assistance.
According to National Aids Council finance director Mr Albert Manenji, funding gaps due to withdrawal of the donor community threaten to leave the majority of people living with HIV on ARVs failing to access treatment.
Due to donor fatigue, the country has so far this year accrued a budget deficit of $39 million for the procurement of ARVs.
Should people on ARVs fail to access treatment, this would have dire consequences on their health as these drugs are supposed to be taken for life.
The financial challenges facing the fight against HIV call for new models to raise money from internal sources.
When the Aids levy was first set up, Zimbabwe’s economy was booming and was the second largest in the Southern Africa Development Community after South Africa.
Most workers were in formal employment and paid taxes to the Government.
However, because of economic challenges of the past decade, the situation is reversed.
The economy has not been performing well; the Gross Domestic Product has fallen, resulting in thousands, if not millions of workers losing their jobs in formal employment.
According to some sources, 70 percent of the country’s population is now employed in the informal sector. Informal traders, though making more money than those in the formal sector, are not paying income tax to the Government and by extension the Aids Levy.
It cannot be sustainable for just 30 percent of the productive workforce to bear the financial burden of the fight against HIV.
Government needs to come up with measures to ensure that the tax net is widened to include people in the informal sector.
We are aware that players in the informal sector already pay presumptive tax on their businesses.
We believe that all businesses in the informal sector should be required to register their workers so that they also pay tax, as they are benefiting from the ARVs bought using money levied from workers in the formal sector.
Colletta Dube