Health Budget Rose by 123.6% in Five Years, Says DG Budget

Ndubuisi Francis in Abuja

The federal government has said that the budgetary allocation to the health sector recorded a 123.6 per cent rise from N305.06 billion in 2016 to N682.13 billion in 2021.

The Director General, Budget Office of the Federation (BoF), Mr. Ben Akabueze who stated this in Abuja, stressed that health allocation had more than doubled over the past five years, attributing this to key and strategic interventions.

Represented by his Technical Adviser, Alfred Okoh, at a high-level meeting with heads of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) on funding for the National Action Plan for Health Security (NAPHS), Akabueze stated that the budget for the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) equally received a boost since 2017 when the NAPHS made a debut.

According to Akabueze, particularly after the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, health funding increased by 75.32 per cent over 2020 and 2021 and further by 40.96 per cent in the proposed 2022 budget.

This, he stressed, was in addition to interventions from the N500 billion COVID-19 fund, totaling N186 billion under the 2020 Budget.

He, however, noted that while there had been consistent effort by the government to put more money in appropriate areas of health between 2012 and 2022, public health financing per capita remained low at $10.

The DG Budget pointed out that while the federal government had continued to increase allocations to health, it was imperative to ensure that the funds were efficiently applied.

He said, “With increased allocations to Health in emergency provisions (from budget amendments in 2020) and 2021 including the 2022 proposal, it is important government for at all levels to improve allocative efficiency for health sector expenditures while improving transparency and accountability frameworks for allocated health sector funds.”

In her presentation, the Senior Programme Manager, Nigeria Health Watch, Dr. Kemi Agbaoye, stated that since 2018 through the ‘Prevent Epidemics Project’, the Nigeria Health Watch has been working to build public and private awareness and demand for epidemic preparedness funding increases at federal and state levels.

Agbaoye observed that the world is constantly under threat of emerging and re-emerging diseases, adding that diseases do not respect borders, and that faster travel allows for infectious diseases to spread around the world in hours.

She noted that as COVID-19 has shown, infectious disease threats affect more than the health sector, and could have strong economic impacts.

Agbaoye, therefore declared that health security needed to be top on the public agenda in Nigeria and taken more seriously.

Key objectives of the high-level meeting with heads of MDAs include to advocate for the inclusion of NAPHS activities in the 2022 budget, to discuss the priority areas and core needs for MDAs with relation to the NAPHS (as shared by their focal persons) and how these needs can be funded with a focus on the domestication of NAPHS in the annual budget.

Others are to further increase the knowledge of NAPHS among stakeholders in epidemic preparedness, and to advocate for multisectoral collaboration for the successful implementation of the NAPHS with the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning, leading the coordination process for advocacy on financing health security in Nigeria.