Include funding for child spacing in 2024 budget, USAID IHP urges Bauchi Gov’t
Samuel Luka, Bauchi
Bauchi state government has been called upon to include in its 2024 budget, funds for the procurement of child spacing, otherwise known as family planning commodities.
The officials of Integrated Health Program (IHP) United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded program stated this during a meeting with Journalist for Public Health Development initiative (J4PD) at the Hazibal Hotel Bauchi yesterday.
The IHP Health Financing Advisor, Pharmacist Khalid Kasimu while speaking at the meeting said that the aim of the Health Financing outlook for 2024 is to ensure that substantial number of the population of the state get registered in any of the Health Insurance Scheme to enable them access healthcare services, thereby reducing out pocket spendings.
According to Pharmacist Kasimu, currently the federal government is the sole supplier of family planning commodities which is distributed to states.
He due to high demand, the availability of the resources from the federal government is not going to be enough, adding that the federal Ministry of health has rolled out a blueprint where states can start their own financing where the demand is high.
“We want to look at commodity financing, we want the government to increase seed stock for commodity expansion so that our health facilities will be equipped with drugs”, he said.
The IHP Health finance Advisor stated that government is already implementing supply chain commodity reform in the state where the drug management agency is responsible for the availability and distribution of commodities to health facilities across the state.
Pharmacist Kasimu while commenting on nutrition, stated Government also need to make resources available for the provision of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) for cases of acute malnutrition.
“We know that USAID has supported the state with 17,000 cartons of the commodity, but we want government to continue to make this commodity available by making significant investments into the availability of RUTF”, Pharmacist Kasimu said.
“We want to see more finances going into service delivery points which will be used for upgrade of facility infrastructures, electricity and water supply at health facilities”, he added.
Pharmacist Kasimu said USAID IHP will continue to advocate for more funding to go to the area of Human Resource for Health.
“Although government has made tremendous effort in employing more health workers in the state, however because of lack of adequate incentive packages to attract medical workers into the state, it has resulted to inadequate Human resource for health” he said
On her part, the State Coordinator of J4PD, Elizabeth Kah encouraged journalists to develop interest in reporting health issues in the state.
She noted that it is part of social corporate responsibility that journalists could give out to the society.
