World’s richest man, Bill Gates has warned that funding of health projects in Nigeria may soon be stopped.
Speaking on a new vision for financing development at the World Bank/IMF meetings in Washington, Gates said development plans by leading financial institutions and philanthropies may be affected by oil prices in Nigeria, leading to a lack of funding for key sectors such as health ; THE CABLE reports.
Gates said, “If you look at the health sector, which is one of the key sectors to get a country to self-sufficiency, the dependence on both development banks, particularly either the dependence on bilateral money, dependence on the new multilaterals, including global fund and Gavi, is super high,” he said.
“When you have these things graduate all at once, essentially from everybody, you lose your Gavi money for new vaccines.
“If the government had a plan and started to do domestic resource mobilization and really understood that the health sector is one that will really start to get a lot less money, then you can imagine the smooth of transition”.
“It’s kind of a black and white thing today. In a country like Nigeria that is dependent on oil prices for such a high percentage of its budget, we can face a situation where not only are the vaccines not being given but also the primary health care as a whole is not being funded.
“So the ODA (official development assistance) system has technical capacity and has the capacity to influence and has resources and all three of those are still fundamentally important to help poor countries get to sufficiency.”
