Valentine’s Day art auction raises over $40 million for UN-backed Global Fund

At a Valentine’s Day art auction in New York yesterday to benefit the United Nations-backed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, more than $40 million was raised to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa.

The contemporary art auction was part of the (RED) campaign, which, since being launched in 2006 by Bono and Bobby Shriver, has become one of the largest consumer-based fundraising efforts by the private sector for an international humanitarian issue.

Yesterday’s event “is yet more confidence expressed in the work of the Global Fund and those thousands of health workers who turn the money into lives saved,” said Michel Kazatchkine, the Fund’s Executive Director.

With support from its partners – the Gap, Hallmark, Apple, Motorola, Emporio Armani, American Express, Converse, Microsoft and Dell – the Global Fund takes no overhead so that all (RED) money is sent directly to the Fund to be invested in HIV/AIDS programmes in Africa.

To date, funds generated by (RED) have already provided anti-retroviral treatments to nearly 30,000 people and reached over one million women and children through counselling, HIV testing and other services.

Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund has contributed more than $10 billion to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria through 550 programmes in 136 countries.