Professor Ali Pate, the ministerial nominee for Bauchi State and potential next minister of health in Nigeria has hinged the expectation of a turnaround in healthcare provision on prioritisation of financing.
Without robust domestic funding of healthcare, Pate said the gaps in the health sector cannot be bridged and will imply that the government is inadvertently outsourcing the prioritization to external actors (mainly international donors).
The global health expert who would have resumed as the chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance on August 3, spoke before the National Assembly during the ongoing ministerial screening on Wednesday.
He said the out-of-pocket health spending in Nigeria ($54) grossly outstrips the total government expenditure on health ($12) which amounts to an inconsequential share of the country’s gross domestic product.
“So in Nigeria most of the spending on healthcare is from families and the government puts $12 to $14 per person which is roughly one percent of the GDP. Niger, our next-door neighbour that has less resources, allocates more than double what we allocate in terms of health spending related to their GDP,” Pate said.
“That’s an indication of prioritization. Ghana similarly, does that. The point I’m making is that domestic financing represents the prioritization given to health. But we are not spending enough, perhaps because the revenue is limited but even within the limited revenue, there’s room to increase the financing for health.”
He concluded that not only the federal government must rise to the occasion. The sub-national level and also the legislature that appropriates these resources to safeguard the financing of essential things like vaccines must also wake up to their responsibility.
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Pate before nomination
Pate has served as a global director of Health, Nutrition, and Population Global Practice at the World Bank, director of the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children, and Adolescents, and the Julio Frenk Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard Chan School.
A profile on Harvard University Center for African Studies website states a U.S. and Nigerian national was until recently the chief executive officer of Big Win Philanthropy, based in the UK.
He served as the minister of state for health between 2011 and 2013 under former President Goodluck Jonathan but resigned to take up a professorial position at Duke University’s Global Health Institute in the US.
After joining the World Bank Group in 2000, Pate worked on health issues in several regions, including Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific.
He worked with some of the countries most affected by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and led programs that resulted in significant changes to healthcare systems and disease control worldwide, during his stint with the World Economic Forum and the World Bank Group.
Pate is a medical doctor trained in both internal medicine and infectious diseases. He has a Master’s in health system management from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and an MBA with a certificate in health sector management from Duke University.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is a public-private partnership that helps vaccinate half the world’s children against some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Since its inception in 2000, Gavi has helped to immunise over 981 million children and prevented more than 16.2 million future deaths, helping to halve child mortality in 73 lower-income countries.
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