About the project — HIV Funding Impacts

Why this project exists

In 2025 the United States began replacing its previous global health assistance arrangements with country-by-country agreements under the America First Global Health Strategy. A total of 34 agreements have been signed so far and 29 cover HIV. The consequences for treatment, testing and prevention will show up in national programme data over several years, in different places and at different speeds.

Most of the figures needed to reflect this status quo already exist. These figures are scattered across donor reporting systems, international estimates and national programme reports, each published on its own schedule, in its own vocabulary, and at its own level of detail. Assembling them by hand for one country takes days and is out of date by the time it is finished. Our pipeline does that assembly programmatically, and we ensure that the resulting figures can be checked by reporting the data origins (i.e., original data sources).

Who runs this project

Dr. Adrian Smith (Associate Professor, Director of Clinical Studies; Nuffield Department of Population Health, Oxford), who specialises in HIV epidemiology, recently presented how HIV funding cuts from the United States affect LMICs. Dr. Jason Hung, who is a technically enabled social and health data scientist partly trained in quantitative health sociology, relocated to the Global South upon finishing his PhD at Cambridge. Upon discussion and given their common interests in HIV/STI research in the Global South contexts, they decided to jointly build and run this project. Adrian is responsible for developing the research design and contextual framing. Jason, on the other hand, is responsible for building the pipeline and this site.

The project is not published by, or affiliated to, any research institution.

Where this project has got to

We built the aggregator layer already, which is complete and near-global, covering panel data from UNAIDS, the WHO Global Health Observatory, the World Bank, the OECD Creditor Reporting System, United States self-reported disbursements and PEPFAR programme results. On top of that, we successfully built four Southeast Asian country connectors at the country layer.

We decided to choose Southeast Asia data collection as the pilot because Jason specialises in, and is most familiar with, data science research in Southeast Asian contexts. We already built the aggregator-level connector that covers Southeast Asia and the other seven LMIC regions. What we lack is the country-level data collection and assessment for the remaining seven LMIC regions.

What comes next

Extend the country-level assessment region by region, beginning with Eastern and Southern Africa, which carries the largest share of both the epidemic and the signed agreements.
Separate United States funding by the agency that disbursed it, so that changes at USAID can be told apart from changes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Publish the pipeline, the codebook and the assembled panel so that the figures on this site can be regenerated independently.

Corrections

If a figure here does not match what a source publishes, the discrepancy is worth reporting and will be investigated against the stored retrieval record. The panel keeps the URL (for the data source) and the date for every row, so it is usually possible to establish whether the source changed or the pipeline read it wrongly.

How to cite