Founded in 1999 when virtually no one in sub-Saharan Africa had access to life-saving HIV treatment, Health GAP played a pivotal role in challenging conventional wisdom that AIDS drugs were too expensive, too difficult to administer, and too low on the priority list to afford access to people in the global South.

Over the past two decades, Health GAP has successfully helped drive down the costs of antiretroviral medicines – in some cases to less than 99% of their initial price. Health GAP played a key role in winning new donor initiatives to support HIV treatment scale-up – such as the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of organizations in the global South to increase access to quality HIV treatment, prevention, and other related services that meet the needs of people living with and affected by HIV. We believe that the human right to life and to health must prevail over drug companies’ excessive profits, expanding patent rights, and other harmful monopolist approaches.