Strengthening Health Systems

In November 2020, BudgIT including partners (under the CTAP project) received support to deliver a singular data system for COVID-19 investments in Africa, engage partners in 7 focus countries to develop strategies for demanding accountability for the use of public resources and service delivery in their contexts and facilitate cross-sectional learning across countries.

Prior to this, BudgIT has worked to deliver health budget analysis reviews, and epidemic preparedness and reviewed the capacities of PHCs in addressing serious health challenges.

The initial work enabled us to create awareness about the need for transparency and accountability in COVID-19 response and recovery in Africa and to kick-start innovative processes in each country that could effectively collaborate with governments and demand effective use of public resources and service delivery – including on relevant emerging issues like vaccine distribution.

In 2020, BudgIT Foundation and Connected Development, through their international offices activated a Pan-African tracking system for all COVID funds received and donated to these countries. BudgIT has demonstrated the capacity to track the resources allocation and donations to COVID-19 across 7 countries as a focus and the continent at large over the last year. We have built partnerships with governments, private sectors, media and other civil society organizations to advance the COVID-19 transparency and accountability project. This project has been expanded to 9 African countries with a core impact on resource accountability and community building.

We have worked to consolidate the gains of phase and leverage the existing partnership we created to ramp up campaigns for vaccination uptake as a preventive way to forestall the fragile African economy to be bugged by the wave of COVID-19 and necessitate a lockdown. Beyond vaccine equity issues, our interest is also to upskill and build cross-sectional capacity across state and non-state institutions on issues of resource management, stakeholder partnerships, civic engagement and others.

In 2021, BudgIT decided to expand its program offering to include “Strengthening Health Systems” which will include health accountability, primary healthcare service delivery, capacity-building programmes and improved data information systems.

To this end, we have carefully built a primary health care accountability tracker, a springboard of tools that make it easy to track the implementation of the Basic Health Care Provision Fund and monitor Primary Health Care across Nigeria for improved quality of care and access to reliable health data. Visit https://www.phctracka.org/ for more.