Nigeria’s health care system will now have a boost in federal funding with a plan to increase its allocation by ten percent of the total budget.
This was disclosed by the special adviser to the president on health Salma Anas at a summit aimed at advancing healthcare financing in Nigeria through pro health taxes.
Many non-communicable diseases are linked to modifiable lifestyle risk factors such as the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.
Diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart diseases are on the increase leading to 1 in 3 deaths from non-communicable diseases.
The key drive at this meeting with key players in the health sector is to not only support pro-health fiscal policies taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages but to also find ways of raising these funds.
President Bola Tinubu’s administration has identified revenue generation as one of its key priorities especially for health care and to help advance the pro health tax policy agenda.
His special assistant on health reveals that improving human capital development through health is the way to go and this will start through an increase in the country’s budget allocation to the health sector.
About Seventy five percent of the country’s population pay out of pocket for health care so this summit hopes to highlight the need to generate economic revenue, which can also be valuable for funding healthcare.
Experts admit that generating revenue from sugar tax can generate as much as 300 billion naira and with this, health financing care can improve exponentially.
