Global Fund’s Michel Kazatchkine, veteran AIDS campaigner

French clinician and health advocate Michel Kazatchkine, who on Tuesday announced he would quit as head of the Global Fund, is one of the most popular figures in the three-decade struggle against AIDS.

Kazatchkine, 65, said he will step down on March 16 as the Fund said it was appointing a “general manager” to overhaul the organisation, which on the brink of its 10th anniversary is struggling with the problems of swift growth.

He was first named executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2007 and was reappointed for a three-year term in 2011.

During his tenure, the Fund became the leading multilateral financing mechanism to combat AIDS, helping to gear up distribution of life-saving drugs to millions of Africans with HIV.

It also became the main funder of programmes to fight TB and malaria.

But as this unique public-private partnership expanded, it also ran into criticism that its structure — designed to be fast in response and low in bureaucracy — could not adequately track the funds it allocated.

Kazatchkine was born in the Paris suburb of Courbevoie to a Russian emigre family of modest background. He was a brilliant student at the city’s elite Louis-le-Grand high school.

He abandoned early ambitions to become a Latin teacher and instead concentrated on medicine, studying nephrology and haemotology in Paris before post-doctoral work in London and Harvard Medical School.

The turning point in his career was in 1983 when he witnessed the first cases of AIDS in France, beginning with a French couple who had been airlifted from Africa and were dying of a mysterious immune deficiency.

The shock of this novel, incurable disease prompted him to set up his own laboratory, where he carried out research into immunology.

Two years later, he also set up a special clinic — essentially an open house for anyone with AIDS, at a time of rampant stigma and discrimination — and it was the success of this project that propelled him to national recognition.

In 1998, he became director of France’s National Agency for AIDS Research (INRA), a role that entailed relentless travelling across the developing world to set up AIDS programmes there.

Before his appointment as Global Fund boss in 2007, he also served as vice chair of the Fund’s board as the first chairman of the organisation’s technical review board, which assesses the quality of grant proposals.

Tall and slim, fluent in English and French and a lover of baroque music, Kazatchkine is extremely popular with grassroots activists.

Many praise his passion for the cause and his championing of the Fund’s commitments to people with HIV, in contrast to other financial institutions often seen as technocratic or remote.

“Michel is an inspiring man and an amazing advocate for civil society,” Andriy Klepikov, executive director of a Ukrainian NGO called Alliance Ukraine, said in email to AFP.

“He has brought much hope through his work at the Global Fund, tirelessly supporting people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS.”

In a statement, the chairman of the Fund’s board, Simon Bland, said, “Few individuals have played a more central role in the creation and evolution of the Global Fund than Michel.”

“His unwavering commitment to health, to human rights and to supporting the weakest and the unprotected has helped shape the Global Fund into the beacon of hope it is today for tens of millions of people around the world.”