Agency Seeks Domestic Funding For Immunisation As Donors Pull Out

The National Primary Healthcare Development Agency in Nigeria is seeking domestic funding for children immunisation, as donor agencies pull out their supports.

The agency also appealed to the Nigerian government to scale up domestic funding to ensure the sustenance of children immunisation.

At the Anglophone-African Immunisation Financing Conference organised to find sustainable domestic funding for vaccines preventable diseases among children in Africa, the Executive Director of the Agency, Mr Ado Muhammed, said that the Federal Government was currently spending $85 million annually for immunisation.

“The cost will increase to about $355 million by the year 2022 when all donor agencies would have suspended their support,” he told the conference on Wednesday.

It is a day-two conference holding in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital and participants from five Anglophone countries including Nigeria gathered to brainstorm over available immunisation financing options for members states.

The Chairman Senate Committee on Primary Health and Communicable Diseases, Mao Ohabuwan, assured the gathering that lawmakers would speedily pass laws that would ensure domestic funding for immunisation

Key speakers at the conference also stressed the need for governments in the Anglophone countries to source alternative funding.

The Director Sustainable Immunization Financing, Sabin Vaccine Institute in the U.S.A, Michael Mcquestion, urged them to scale up their domestic funding even in the face of dwindling revenue.

Since the year 2000, donor agencies bore 75 per cent of Nigeria’s immunisation financing burden.

But this is about to stop, as Nigeria is now being classified as a medium income earning country by a recent world bank rating after the re-basing of the economy in 2014.