Aditya Wardhana is a passionate community health activist and public health expert that served as an Executive Director of NGO Indonesia AIDS Coalition (IAC), a community-based organization which aims to fulfil the rights of people living with HIV and key affected population, especially the rights of health.
Since it was first established in 2011, he has led IAC into advocacy works in the issues of HIV Program sustainability in Indonesia in terms of funding, budget allocation, CSO fund channeling and commodity price; promoting enabling environment for key population of HIV and AIDS, access to affordable medicines and HIV legal framework.
In addition to successfully led the advocacy team in increasing fiscal space and government spending for ARV Medicines for HIV and AIDS, he also had successfully led the team in advocating several lifesaving medicines to be included into the Indonesian Universal Health Coverage and Government Budget, namely the Peggylated Interferon and Sofosbuvir for Hepatitis C treatment, Sildenafil for Pulmonary Hypertension disease, and has a vision to do the same for HIV treatment as part of sustainability strategy.
Just recently, he also had successfully encouraged the ARV medicines price reduction in Indonesia through a fairer and transparent bidding competition, in which he and the team continuously monitor to ensure the price reduction actually practiced in the state procurement process.
In 2019 onward, since Indonesia has now moved into upper middle income country classification, Aditya engaged IAC to concentrate in funding sustainability issues, thus focusing IAC’s works on four main strategies aiming for the sustainability of HIV Program, which are:
- Encourage country ownership transition plan to domestic funding – we have raised up the issues regarding the importance of having a transition plan, and planning on conducting a transition readiness assessment.
- Allocative efficiently / strategic purchasing – IAC is currently focusing on the rationalization of ARV price in Indonesia, as well as other health commodities, so that Indonesia will have fiscal space in order to increase coverage as well as to fund those less funded programs, and also other cost effective options.
- Increase fiscal space – under the 2-year SHIFT Project of the Regional Global Fund, IAC had done a budget planning scheme in district level study and advocacy, and encourage active engagement from the community to advocate the budget planning and involve in monitoring of the process for better HIV budgeting from the district level up.
- Encourage the CSO funding scheme availability, by studying and advocating the government budget mechanism that could be accessed by CSO, and by improving CSO’s capacity in terms of financial management system, participatory planning skill, proposal preparation, which aims for domestic funding.
Aditya believes that health is development issue. He is strongly striving to ensure government’s responsibility to fulfil their mandate as stated on our National Charter that ensures the wellbeing of all Indonesian people, without exception.
Aditya also believes in community engagement, in which according to his years’ experience, the government and community are two interrelated pillars that are depend on each other. The role of civil society is recognized as essential in supporting the HIV-AIDS limitation in various countries, whereas Indonesia is no exception.
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane” – Martin Luther King, Jr.