By Philip Yatai

Mr Ibrahim Abubakar, Health Management Information System Officer, Kaduna State Primary Health Care Board, says Community Development Charter will strengthen community engagement in the health budgeting process in Kaduna state.

Abubakar stated this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Zaria on Wednesday, on the side line of a two-day training of trainers on development of community health needs.

He described CDC as a “written document containing the development needs of a community, generated by the community members and listed in order of priority”.

He said that the approach would enable health officials to extract community health needs as contained in the CDC document for the development of the health sector Annual Operational Plan (AOP).

He said that the needs would then be analysed and aligned with the health priority areas of the state and allocate funds for implementation in the local and state governments’ budget.

“This step is a welcome development that will strengthen what the state is already doing to strengthen community participation in the development of the health AOP and budget

“The CDC approach means that there will be wider stakeholder engagements and participation which will ensure that governments interventions in the health sector reflect community needs,” he said.

The official said that the government was already moving away from training, meetings and workshop-based AOP, to service delivery-based AOP for quality service delivery in health facilities.

He explained that the traditional AOP in the past was majorly based on meetings, training, and workshops, with little issues around service delivery.

“Even the few services delivery issues captured in the AOP are not implementable because the activities were not issue-based.

“This has negatively affected the performance of the health sector, with the state recording the highest rate of neonatal death, and among the leading states with disturbing health indices in the country,” he said.

Abubakar said that to address the challenge, the state government from 2020 adopted a bottleneck analysis approach to determine priority areas for intervention.

He said that the approach enables the state to identify issues, proffer solutions and convert the solution to strategy and actions.

According to him, the CDC process will further strengthen community participation in the sector and ensure robust community input in the health AOP and the budget.

The Save the International (SCI) in partnership with Kaduna State Primary Health Care Development Board (KSPHCDB) is training Local Government Community Engagement Focal Persons on development of Community Health Charter.

Mr Farouk Abdulkadir, Advocacy and Campaign Coordinator, Save the Children International (SCI) explained that the ToT was supported by SCI under Gates Anchor IV Grant.

Abdulkadir said that the effort was to promote citizens’ engagement in the health budgeting process to ensure that citizens’ health needs were adequately captured in the state and local government health budget.  

This, according to him, will enable community members to set their health priorities and engage the government to ensure that health budget and expenditure is based on their health needs.