The Global Fund, Digital Health and Human Rights
The Global Fund spends over US$150 million annually to strengthen health information systems, improve the availability and quality of digital data, and provide digital tools for health workers, leveraging private sector partnerships to support its investments. While new digital technologies transform national health systems, enhance public health surveillance, and offer new opportunities to promote individual health and well-being, they also present novel and, in some cases, unprecedented risks and challenges that are yet to be fully explored.
Governments and private companies have been struggling to keep up with effective regulation and practices that ensure strong privacy standards and protect against technology-facilitated abuse. In the context of growing anti-rights legislation and local ordinances and the normalization of technology-facilitated abuse, communities living with and affected by HIV, TB and malaria, particularly key, vulnerable and criminalized populations are experiencing increasing harms, including doxxing, bullying, harassment, stalking, blackmail, extortion and physical violence. This has a chilling effect on freedom of expression and civic space as well as on individuals’ trust and willingness to engage in digital health.
In 2024, the Developed Country NGO Delegation to the Board of the Global Fund commissioned a study to investigate the challenges that Global Fund communities and civil society experience in the digital health transformation, viewed from a rights-based perspective. The study further examined the Global Fund’s mandate and capacity to address these challenges and identify opportunities to strengthen its approach to digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The study also considered the benefits and advantages that digital technologies offer Global Fund communities. The study proposed 13 main recommendations and 30 sub-recommendations, and the Developed Country NGO Delegation has met with relevant Secretariat departments to discuss their perspectives on the recommendations.
In June 2025, a shorter brief has been published to update the study’s recommendations with a proposed timeline. We encourage Board constituencies, partners and allies to review the updated recommendations and consider
supporting the efforts and sign-on letter to move the issues forward at the Committee and Board levels.
Download The Global Fund, Digital Health, and Human Rights: A Study of Digital
Risks and Institutional Capacity here.
Download Brief here.
Sign on to solidarity letter here.