Connected Development (CODE) and BudgIT have called on the government of Nigeria to give urgent attention to the nation’s primary health care services.
The non-governmental organisations (NGO) made the call at the launch of their Covid-19 Transparency and Accountability Project (CTAP) website.
Development Diaries reports that the aim of the website is to further enhance the tracking of Covid-19 intervention funds across seven African countries.
BudgIT and CODE’s Follow The Money are tracking Covid-19 intervention funds in Nigeria, The Gambia, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Cameroon, and Kenya.
The website currently displays information on $51.05 billion resources committed to Covid-19 across Africa, $5.08 billion donations and over 2,532 Covid-19 datasets across Africa.
‘Data collected from 90 primary health care centres by Follow The Money shows that infrastructure development requires urgent attention from the Nigerian government and we are calling on government to declare this a national emergency’, Chief Executive of Connected Development (CODE) and Follow The Money, Hamzat Lawal, said in Abuja.
‘We have also observed that most of the primary health care centres do not have access to water and electricity.
Furthermore, Lawal noted that, in some cases, doctors, nurses and officials in primary health care centres had no access to electricity and had to rely on the use of rechargeable lanterns or mobile phones to be able to serve the people.
For his part, BudgIT CEO, Gabriel Okeowo, said that the organisations launched the CTAP website to track Covid-19 resources.
Okeowo said that this was because a lot of resources were committed to the fight against the pandemic.
‘So this initiative in tracking and reporting the activities and resources that is going into CTAP is part of the initiative and effort to position Africa in the right path’, he said.
‘This is for us to be able to redeem our image before the international community and then be able to account for resources that have been committed to the fight against Covid-19.
‘Record has it that so far we had almost 50 billion dollars committed to Covid-19 across Africa, so this website that we are launching is a one-stop centre for every one’.
Speaking at the CTAP conference in April 2021, the organisations concluded that corruption and lack of transparency in the allocation of resources had weakened the response to the pandemic.
The NGOs revealed that out of the 36 states in Nigeria, 27 states do not have a breakdown of their Covid-19 expenses.
According to them, they reviewed Nigeria’s current fiscal support and institutional response to the pandemic, analysed data on Covid-19 response in the country, including donations, allocations, disbursements and palliative distribution processes at both the national and subnational levels.
Source: CODE
Photo source: CODE/Jide Ojediran