Official Development Assistance: Bilateral Allocations

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler (CB)]

My Lords, HIV/AIDS may have gone off the front pages here in Britain, rightly or wrongly, but what is beyond doubt is that it remains a serious scourge in many countries overseas. How do our overseas assistance programmes, current and future, measure up to that specific and very serious challenge?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

It is absolutely a serious challenge. While we see medical advances that enable us to make progress, we see problems emerge in other areas. We see prevalence among young girls, in particular, increasing to a worrying extent. This is one of the reasons that we decided to maintain a very strong commitment to the Global Fund, which as noble Lords will know, fights three diseases, one of which is HIV. We work closely with the Global Fund and our country partners in order to keep going on this battle, which we are making progress with, but there is still an awful lot more to do.