Budget reform process boosts healthcare expenditure, priority areas – Stakeholders

The federal government and other stakeholders say the technical assistance provided by the Result for Development (R4D) in collaboration with the Sydani Group to the Federal Ministry of Health in budget process reforms has helped improve the expenditure for healthcare and better value for the money invested in healthcare in the country.

They made this known on Monday during the high level sustainability meeting organised by R4D in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Health in Abuja.

Dr Hope Uweja, Nigeria country director, R4D, said the organisation said one of the key gains is that it has prepared the ministry to improve the alignment between the expenditure and budgeting in the country with national health priorities and policies.

He said, “So you now see a situation where more expenditure is going into areas that will give better value for money being spent for health both in terms of providing financing for primary healthcare and also targeting areas where expenditure for health is mostly expenditure for the needed, particularly for the vulnerable groups, maternal and child health and other areas that have been calling for attention in the past years.”

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Minister of Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire, said since 2018, R4D/Sydani has been providing technical assistance to the ministry’s budget process reforms to make federal-level healthcare budgets more strategic.

Represented by Elisha Benjamin, deputy director, Policy and Planning, he said with the R4D/Sydani support, the ministry has instituted a collaboration mechanism between the Department of Health, Planning, Research, and Statistics (DHPRS) and Department of Finance and Accounts (DFA) in developing strategic healthcare budgets.

He said it also developed and submitted annual strategic health budgets with at least 80% informed by annual operational plans (AOP) drawn from national health sector strategic priorities, and also developed an intermediate budget performance monitoring framework that tracks financial investments against health outcomes among others.

He said the ministry budget process reform was aimed at addressing key challenges across the three phases of the budget process from budget formulation, execution and monitoring, adding that over the past 3 years, improvements have been recorded.

Dr Francis Ukwuije, a health economist with the World Health Organisation (WHO), said there were still challenges in the releases of the budgets allocated.