Nigeria to address concerns as Bill Gates pledges $7 billion for Africa

Nigeria’s Vice President Kashim Shettima has promised that the identified concerns around the financing of primary health centres across the country will be addressed by the administration of President Bola Tinubu.

This is as the Co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, reiterated the commitment of the philanthropic organisation to commit $7 billion to support routine immunisation in the country and the whole of Africa.

Mr Shettima, who identified polio as one of the major primary healthcare challenges in the country, noted the administration is considering providing “timely domestic financing for the procurement of vaccines, which couldn’t have come sooner, to boost our industrial capacity to produce vaccines.”

He said this on Thursday at a parley attended by governors under the auspices of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF), the Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, and the business mogul and founder of Dangote Foundation, Aliko Dangote.

In a statement issued by the Office of the Vice President and signed by the Director of Information, Olusola Abiola, Mr Shettima noted that Nigeria’s three-dose pentavalent vaccine coverage against polio has improved from 33 per cent in 2016 to 57 per cent in 2021.

About polio in Nigeria

On 25 August 2020, Nigeria and the rest of Africa were formally certified free of the Wild Polio Virus (WPV) by the World Health Organisation (WHO) after no case of the virus was detected on the continent for three years.

Nigeria was the last African country to eliminate the virus, which could be prevented with adequate vaccination.

As of 2012, Nigeria accounted for half of the world’s polio cases – a viral disease transmitted from person to person, “mainly through a faecal-oral route or, less frequently, through contaminated water or food, and multiplies inside the intestines.”

Meanwhile, about a year after the certification by WHO, in 2021, Adamawa State, North-east Nigeria, detected cases of circulating Vaccine-Derived Poliovirus type 2.

Experts have linked the development to weak routine vaccination coverage, vaccine refusal, difficult access to some locations, and poor vaccination campaigns, among other reasons.

Vaccination data

While addressing the gathering, the Vice President said: “The variant polio virus has declined in Nigeria by 84 per cent from 2021, falling to fewer than 200 cases in 2022.”

Mr Shettima, therefore, commended the states that have achieved high-category immunisation coverage, said to be between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of the target demographic. He noted that the number of states has increased from 12 to 21 in five years.

He said, “The Federal Government and our respective state governments are going to set in place a transparent process and structure to undo the reality of the country as one with one of the highest proportions of non-immunised infants in the world over the last decade,” even as he added that the government is “committed to eradicating variant poliovirus by the end of the year ensuring that every Nigerian child is covered in the routine immunisation campaigns.”

On the production of vaccines for the immunisation of children, he assured that the administration will ensure collaboration with both governmental and non-governmental entities “to ensure that these vaccines are made available even to zero-dose children, of which ours, at 2 million, are the highest in the world after India.

The Vice President expressed the appreciation of the Nigerian government to partners such as the Dangote Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, whose empathy he noted has “shone through that uncertain period in our history.”

$7 billion pledge

Earlier in his remarks at the interactive session, Mr Gates said his foundation had recently announced the intention to commit $7 billion to Africa in the next four years to support routine immunisation in Nigeria and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Northern Nigeria.

Mr Gates, who arrived in Nigeria on Monday, had met President Tinubu to discuss possible areas of collaboration in the administration’s efforts to reform the health sector.

READ ALSO: Nigeria committed to eradicating variant poliovirus by 2023 – Shettima

The meeting with the Vice President and the governors on Thursday was part of Mr Gates’ efforts to mobilise support for improved funding and coordinated intervention in the nation’s primary healthcare subsector.

The philanthropy is spending the week in Nigeria and Niger Republic as a follow-up to his earlier meeting with authorities in China on similar issues.

Also, in his remarks, Mr Dangote said he and Mr Gates have been partnering with the federal and state governments for many years, supporting the efforts to eradicate polio and improving routine immunisation, nutrition and primary healthcare in the country.

“We genuinely believe that the National Economic Council and the decisions that you will make over the next four years will determine whether Nigeria has sound economic growth, keep its citizens happy and achieves the sustainable development goals,” Mr Dangote said.

Governors react

According to the statement, in their separate remarks, the Chairman of Nigeria Governors’ Forum and Kwara State Governor, Abdulrahman Abdulrasaq, and some governors who spoke at the parley, lauded the philanthropic interventions of the Dangote and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations in critical areas including healthcare, education, agriculture and human capital development.

The governors reportedly expressed their readiness to further collaborate with the foundations in the coming years.