Following the recent presentation of the 2018 Appropriation Bill to the Joint Session of the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari, the National Association of Community Health Practitioners of Nigeria, NACHPN, has decried a sharp decline in the allocation to the health sector.
The National President of the association, Akor Okechukwu, at a press conference in Abuja on Monday, observed that while the overall National budget of the country has grown by 92% from N4.49 trillion in 2015 to N8.61 trillion in 2018, the same could not be said of the health sector.
“The problem is that the 2018 health budget as a proportion of total national budget is only 3.9%. This is the lowest share of national budget allocated to health sector in recent times.
“In 2015, 5.7% of the total national budget was allocated to health, but by 2018 it is only 3.9%. This is a fall of about 2%,” Mr Okechukwu said.
According to him, the prosperity of the country reflected in the growth of the national budget has unfortunately not yet been fully felt in the health sector.
The president however stated that in as much as the 2018 health budget is a good one, with a lot of important projects attracting good funding, the whole gamut of it falls short of the 2001 Abuja Declaration which promised to allocate not less than 15% of total national budget to health sector.
Mr Okechukwu drew an analogy that Ghana’s 2018 allocation to the health sector is 7.1% while that of Nigeria is 3.96% to the same sector, which indicates that Nigeria is trailing far behind Ghana.
He therefore called on the National Assembly and all the relevant stakeholders to do the needful by improving funding for Nigeria’s health system beginning from the 2018 Appropriation Bill.
“We all advocate for improved and adequate funding for Nigeria’s health sector to ensure that the Nigerian government honours its policy commitments to the health sector in general and child and family health in particular,” Mr Okechukwu added.
DAILY NIGERIAN can report that NACHPN comprises various frontline primary health care professionals partnering with Advocacy in Child and Family Health at Scale, PACFAH@Scale, to hold government to account for adequate funding of the health sector and for the full implementation of key policies related to child and family health.
