The Africa Health Budget Network (AHBN) has organised a 3-day technical peer review retreat on strengthening accountability of health security finances in Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Senegal.
The retreat which was held in Abuja within the week drew participants from the four countries comprising of Civil Society Organisations and the media.
Speaking at the opening session, Coordinator of AHBN, Dr. Aminu Magashi Garba explained that the retreat was a time to share ideas, learn from AHBN’s accountability framework and for each delegate to develop scorecards perculiar to their country and use it to drive advocacy.
He said: “This is a Civil Society -led advocacy accountability, that is the more reason why we excited that We are convening to look at a civil society led accountability framework. We are used to having a lot of framework being brought to us by the donors. And also the African leaders but this is an initiative by the civil society, not prompted by anybody from the global North or global south.
“Africa is one of the continent being ravaged by so many outbreak of diseases, it’s important for us to plan, also to ensure that civil society address accountability for health security finances, also for resources and growth”, he said.
He noted that the world and indeed Africa was grappling with infectious diseases like Cholera, Mpox, Ebola, Covid-19, Diphtheria and others, hence the need to put proactive measures in place.
“There are so many infections and we have to prepare as a continent. In preparing as a continent, the civil society must be up and doing and one of the ways for us to make contribution is to support the government and intergovernmental bodies to promote accountability”, he said.
According to Dr. Magashi, “huge resources are coming to Africa, Pandemic Fund, Africa CDC, Afrexim bank, the Africa Development Bank, Covax facility, USAID, FCDO and others, so it’s important to monitor how these are used to promote health security.
“If we do a scorecard the findings will be used to drive advocacy and target the policy makers, address them to improve the public health emergency response”.
On her part, Health Economist and Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist at AHBN, Mrs. Maimuna Abdullahi explained that the objective of the peer review, learning and exchange retreat was to share best practices from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Senegal subgrantees.
She said it was also to enhance the capacity of CSOs in the four countries to
domesticate the regional health security accountability framework to performance of health security commitments at country level and strengthen the West and Central African Hub, focusing on health security accountability.
One of the benefiaries from Cameroon, the Executive Director, Actions for Development and Empowerment, Ndi Nancy Saiboh disclosed that she was at the retreat to learn new skills that would help her record success in her advocacy endeavors:
“I’m here to learn, as a civil society actor, we have to constantly develop our skills so when we are doing our advocacy, we have everything and learning from other countries will help to build our capacity so that when we are in front of different stakeholders, we have the right words and materials to push our work.
“The Government is working but COVID-19 exposed a lot of gaps. We don’t want that if a pandemic happens, we are still struggling, battling with health challenges.
“In Cameroon, we have health agencies that takes care of health security, but we still have a lot of gaps when it comes to accountability of resources because we don’t talk about it”, she said.
Saiboh noted that attending the previous retreat held in August, 2023 opened her eyes to the need for CSOs and the media to be interested in how resources for health were being used. She added that the knowledge gained have spurred their work such that they were being invited to the decision table with the government and development partners.
