Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in West and Central Africa who converged in Abuja, Nigeria, have called on African governments to prioritize the establishment of a Pandemic Fund to swiftly respond to health emergencies and pandemic responses at country level.
Attending a three-day conference organized by the African Health Budget Network (AHBN) based in Abuja, Nigeria, the Executive Director of Health Alert-Sierra Leone, Victor Lansana Koroma who attended this peer review retreat, thanked the National Coordinator of AHBN for converging CSOs within West and Central Africa.
These CSOs made the call during the three-day technical peer review retreat in Abuja for Government to strengthen accountability of health security finances in Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and Senegal to address pandemic response.
The Programme Manager, Health Sector Reform Foundation (HERFON), Dr Opeyemi Adeosun, said, “We want an emergency fund for health security with ease in accessibility such that if there is an outbreak, under 24 hours people who need to be there should move to prevent it from escalating”.
He explained that the fund should be separated from what was allocated to the Ministry of Health and sister agencies because of the bottlenecks associated with disbursements. He noted that their appeal was for the African governments, with emphasis on Nigeria, because Nigerians travel to a lot of countries and were natural hosts to some of the diseases.
On his part, the National Coordinator of AHBN, Dr Aminu Magashi Garba, stressed that the continent was faced with numerous disease outbreaks coupled with dwindling resources; therefore, there was a need to ensure transparency and accountability in the disbursement of the funds allocated to health.
Dr Garba explained that the retreat was an opportunity for CSOs to learn and use the AHBN-developed accountability framework to drive advocacy for proper utilisation of funds allocated to health in their countries.
He emphasized that, “the launching of the regional accountability framework for health security in these four countries in the room—Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Senegal, and Cameroon—are going to roll out the use of scorecards at county level to track progress, accountability for results, and accountability for resources.”
The Executive Director of Health Alert, Victor Lansana Koroma, stated that, “this engagement is extremely very important because it gives us an opportunity to understand more details about how to engage our policymakers at country level”.