With a yearend target date approaching, the multibillion-dollar Global AIDS and Health Fund is taking shape through discussions among major countries and international organizations.

The highly publicized fund's success will depend on how much money it will be able to raise from the private sector, governments and official organizations in the medium and long terms.

And amid a deepening global economic slowdown, however, donations are coming in a trickle. Indeed, no Japanese company or business person has yet to chip in.

According to Japanese government sources, the Transitional Working Group, which was set up last summer at the initiative of the Group of Eight major industrialized countries, reached a basic agreement on many key elements at its last meeting in Brussels in late November.

For instance, the fund's Governing Board, which will be independent of any international organizations, will be composed of 18 members with voting rights. Among them will be seven government officials from industrialized nations, another seven from developing countries and four representatives from the private sector.

Of the four private-sector representatives, two will be from nongovernmental organizations — one from an industrialized country and the other from a developing nation — and the remaining two from the business world.

The World Bank and two U.N.-affiliated bodies based in Geneva — the World Health Organization and UNAIDS — as well as one nongovernmental organization will also be represented on the board as observers.

The working group, chaired by Dr. Chrispus Kiyonga, a former Ugandan health minister, also decided that the fund will hold a general assembly session twice a year and that all financial contributors — individuals, governments, private companies and organizations — will be allowed to attend.

The Transitional Working Group also agreed to make the World Bank a "trustee" of the fund to monitor the actual flow of money, the sources said.

A secretariat will be set up to run the day-to-day operations, but no agreement has been reached yet on where it will actually be set up. WHO and UNAIDS insist that the fund secretariat be established in Geneva — where they have their own headquarters — while France wants to see the secretariat established at the Paris branch of the World Bank, the sources said.

A group of health experts from the private sector will provide technical advice to the Governing Board. A "country process commission" will also be created in each recipient country to work out effective programs for combating AIDS and other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria.

The status of such a country-by-country commission remains to be resolved, the sources said.

The Transitional Working Group will meet again in Brussels next week in hopes of reaching a final agreement on the details of the fund, the sources said.

In June, the U.N. Special General Assembly on AIDS adopted a political declaration calling for an early establishment of the fund, which was originally proposed by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to promote the international crusade against AIDS.

The G8 — the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Russia — also endorsed the fund at a summit in the Italian port city of Genoa in late July and pledged a total of $1.3 billion in financial contributions, including $200 million committed each by the U.S., Britain and Japan.

At the previous G8 summit in Okinawa in July 2000, Japan had pledged $3 billion in aid to developing countries over five years to help them fight infectious diseases. It remains unclear whether the $200 million committed for the Global AIDS and Health Fund will come from the $3 billion aid program, or be on top of that program.

Although Annan has said up to $10 billion will ultimately become necessary, financial pledges from the international community — individuals, governments, private companies and nongovernmental organizations — are a far cry from that goal: $1.5 billion.

According to the U.N., some 36 million people were living with AIDS as of last year. Nearly 70 percent of them were in heavily impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS medicine is too costly for most patients. WHO and UNAIDS warned recently that the number will reach 40 million by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, a record 3 million people died as a result of AIDS last year.