A breakdown of the 2020 budget for health is now available. Check it out here
Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari, has presented the present administration’s last budget before the National Assembly. While several key components of the proposed budget are yet to be made public, there are strong indications about the government’s desired priorities and plans for the health sector.
In his speech, President Buhari revealed the health ministry and the defence ministry jointly have the highest recurrent expenditure. Both ministries are expected to pay salaries and overheads totalling NGN62 billion in 2019.
You can access the full health budget visualization and source links here.
A key element of the budgetary allocation for health is the 1 percent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund amounting to N51.22 billion which has been earmarked for the Basic Health Care Provision Fund.
Speaking on the health sector, the president said health is an important part of his government’s aspirations for human capital development and he pledged they will continue to strive to make Nigerians healthy and happy. But these lofty ambitions were not reflected by the government’s budgetary allocation for health which was less than 2% of the total budget.
Furthermore. while health is among the Top 12 ministries with the highest budget allocation, it ranked in the bottom half.
In 2019, the Nigerian government’s expenditure for health includes major investments in vaccination, notably the tens of billions of naira it is setting aside a total of N24.75 billion for the Global Vaccine Alliance, Gavi, and the Global Fund, rising from the N3.5 billion that was set aside for the same purpose in 2018.
Another obvious component of the health budget is the provision for the establishment of cancer treatment centers in 9 federal government-owned teaching hospitals – University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH), University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH), Ahmadu-Bello University Teaching Hospital (ABUTH), University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH), Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital (OAUTH), University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH), Federal Medical Center (FMC) Owerri, and FMC Abeokuta.
The establishment of the cancer centers will gulp a total of N700 million according to the proposed budget presented by the president although healthnews.ng’s investigations revealed a similar project was approved in the 2018 budget to the tune of over N300 million.
“In addition to building world class treatment centres, including for cancer, we will be establishing a health system that prioritises primary health care so that millions of our people can be insured for a minimum package of services with the poorest exempt from co-payments.”
President Muhammadu Buhari while presenting the proposed 2019 budget to the joint session of the National Assembly.