The Nigeria Solidarity Support Fund (NSSF) has intensified its plea to the public for support to mobilise and aggregate resources for Nigeria’s fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
The private sector-led not-for-profit organisation is seeking to raise funds for the vaccination of one million Nigerians before the end of 2022.
Fejiro Chinye-Nwoko, general manager, NSSF said programs are being rolled to mobilise funds from well-meaning Nigerians to achieve this goal in a statement provided to BusinessDay on Tuesday.
She explained that the funds raised would be plowed towards building vaccine acceptance and accelerating equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics across the country with a special focus on vulnerable members of society.
“The Fund’s work is never done, as a matter of fact, it just began. It is constantly reaching out to philanthropists, corporate organisations, Nigerians at home and in the diaspora, public sector institutions and international donor agencies to join hands and support this initiative which has been created by Nigerians for the benefit of Nigerians,” Chinye-Nwoko said.
The organisation is particularly looking to leverage key partnerships to fill the resource pond to achieve its goal. KPMG, one of the big four auditing firms globally is one of NSSF’s key partners, supporting transparency, reporting, fund management operations as well as monitoring and evaluation of grants issuance in line with best practice.
Read also: Vaccine equity and the COVID-19 response
Access Bank, one of Nigeria’s largest commercial banks, has offered support as its Nigerian banking partner and works with the NSIA and other partners to ensure that funds contributed to the NSSF are properly accounted for and disbursed.
On the international front, Allen and Overy is the law firm supporting the NSSF in its legal dealings, helping to ensure that the NSSF follows all international best practices while Olaniwun Ajayi is the Nigerian legal partner.
Olaniwun Ajayi ensures that the NSSF complies with all extant laws and regulations of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
The Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), the non-profit, non-partisan private sector organisation with a mandate to promote and champion the reform of the Nigerian economy is also supporting the NSSF to develop its policy and governance framework.
Coronation Asset Management, an arm of the Coronation Group, supports the NSIA for the NSSF’s fund management operations and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), one of the biggest consulting firms in the world, is tasked with handling grants administration on behalf of the fund.
“These high-level partnerships with corporate organisations are important to ensure that the NSSF can support Nigeria’s most vulnerable people, build resilient health systems, and help Nigeria’s youth build skills relevant to a post-Covid-19 era. With NSSF nothing is left to chance,” the general manager, NSSF said.
The NSSF was established primarily to supplement the federal government’s efforts to mitigate the adverse economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on Nigerians.
It executes this by supporting vulnerable members of the population, strengthening the country’s healthcare system and reskilling the Nigerian workforce for a post-pandemic era.
Its priority for 2022 is to ensure that more Nigerians get vaccinated against covid-19 whilst promoting awareness of the efficacy and importance of these vaccines.
Recently, NSSF partnered with the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) to improve vaccine equity and boost Covid-19 vaccine access for vulnerable Nigerians.
The sum of N300 million was donated to support the NPHCDA Covid-19 vaccination programme in Nigeria.
The donation is expected to help secure an additional one million doses of Covid-19 vaccines for Nigerians during the Phase 3 rollout of the vaccination programme.
