Kampala — Uganda is among the 10 lowest-ranked countries in terms of average grant performance, according to a new report by Aidspan, a Nairobi-based independent watchdog of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Uganda is in position 108 out of the 114 Global Fund recipient countries with Kenya at position 110 in ranking covering the period 2006 through 2008. But ranked among the top 10 performers, in fourth position, is Rwanda.

To facilitate its belief in "performance-based funding," each time the Fund receives a request from a principal recipient (the Ministry of Finance in the case of Uganda) for a new disbursement of grant money, it provides a rating of the recipient's recent work.

If the Aidspan report claims are true, then Uganda might lose some funding from Global Fund due to under-performance. Aidspan was inspired to conduct the analysis because the Global Fund does not make its grant ratings easily available to members of the public, and has not published any report analysing these ratings.

Therefore in an effort to fill this gap, the watchdog conducted an analysis of the 1,934 grant ratings that the Fund has provided over the past three years. "Thus, Aidspan is not using its own judgment, from one grant to the next, regarding what score should be given to a grant," reads the report released last week.

"Aidspan is simply taking the Global Fund's ratings and is converting them, using a consistent and neutral system, into a score that provides a basis for aggregation and comparison."

Uganda had 11 of her grants analysed and the average score rating was 35 per cent. By press time, we had not received the promised response to the claims raised in the Aidspan analysis from the Ministry of Health.

Overall, the analysis found that ministries of finance have been the least well-performing Principal Recipients type. In 2005, the Global Fund suspended all its five grants to Uganda totalling $201 million for two months after it emerged that part of the money released earlier had been mismanaged.

Three former ministers and several other programme implementers are on trial over this misuse.