Nigeria’s Minister of Health, Professor Babatunde Osotimehin, has been appointed to chair the committee on financing for Health Research and the establishment of a public health emergency fund for the African region.
Professor Osotimehin’s appointment at a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) African regional conference in Kigali, Rwanda, followed the unanimous calls for an urgent need to address the dwindling funding of the African Region by the WHO.
The minister’s Special Adviser on Communications, Mr. Niyi Ojuolape informed that the committee which comprises Health Ministers from Angola, Burundi, Cameroun, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Lesotho, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa and Nigeria is coming on the heels of the grave concern to the issues of maternal mortality and the H1N1 pandemic among others in the region.
According to him, these, among others “have been recognized as suffering from lack of a clear source of international funding like we have in the case of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM)”.
Deliberating on the need for the Public Health Emergency Funds for Region and modalities for its establishment and implementation mechanisms, he said the Health Ministers emphasized the urgent need for this intervention following the sparse allocation of the regular annual budget of the African Regional Office that are designed for specific programmes and cannot be utilized for other programmes.
He stressed that the public health needs of the African Region and the current global financial meltdown makes the establishment inevitable as this would address the looming funding gap in coming years.
As part of its resolutions, the committee mandated articulate clear justifications for the funding drawing on specific example of contingencies that would necessitate the application of such funds to tackle issues like the H1N1 pandemic and AAVP.
The committee also considered that in establishing the fund, there should be flexibility in determining which programmes areas the funds could be utilized for and the percentage of the fund that could be committed to a specific programme.
This, the minister’s aide said was in recognition of the fact that public health priorities change over time. It was understood that the fund should basically constitute additional funding for targeted priority areas.
The fund, it was agreed would be developed based on voluntary
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment