The International Budget Partnership (IBP) Nigeria and the Kano State Government on Saturday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Kano to strengthen transparency and accountability in health sector financing.
The partnership will support the development of a health financing dashboard to enable stakeholders to monitor budget planning, releases, expenditure and performance across health sector agencies in the state.
The Commissioner for Health, Dr Abubakar Labaran, said the partnership had brought significant improvements in budget planning, execution and tracking in the ministry. He added that the dashboard would enable the ministry to monitor the performance of its various units and agencies in real time.
Labaran said the state government would continue to work with IBP and other partners to improve budget performance, releases and other issues relating to health financing.
IBP Country Director Dr Olayinka Babalola, represented by Policy and Strategy Lead Onyekachi Chukwu, said the dashboard aimed to improve transparency around health budgeting and provide a comprehensive picture of expenditure.
He noted that Kano was already making significant investments in the health sector alongside development partners, but tracking where the funds were going had been a challenge. The MoU will support the state in developing a health financing dashboard that will enable stakeholders to monitor expenditure by various agencies in the health sector. It will also provide information on the full range of investments in the sector and show where the funds are being spent.
Babalola said the platform would help stakeholders track reasons why certain health services were not being delivered. The information would enable relevant authorities to identify gaps in service delivery and take appropriate measures to address them.
Dr Shamsuddin Sani, State Representative of the Gates Foundation in Kano, said the foundation was supporting the initiative to address longstanding challenges in monitoring fund flow within the health sector. The project would particularly focus on primary healthcare service delivery and provide clearer information on resources coming into the sector.
Sani said that over the years, the health sector in Kano had faced challenges in tracking the amount of funding coming into the system, how much was being spent and how much was not reaching the intended areas. Government and development partners working in the sector have not had a clear picture of the resources coming into the health system and how they are being utilised.
“With this project, we want to close that gap by ensuring that we know exactly how much resources are coming into the primary healthcare system and the broader health sector in the state,” he said.
Sani added that the initiative would also help determine the resources required by the sector and compare government funding with contributions from development partners. The grant for the project was conceived to address the identified gaps, and implementation began earlier in the year.
The dashboard is expected to provide stakeholders with timely information on health financing and expenditure to support better planning, monitoring and service delivery in the state.
