Senior Health Specialist at the World Bank Dr. Olumide Okunola, has emphasised the importance of public financing to achieving meaningful Demographic Dividends (DD), stressing the urgent need for a demographic transition of the country.
Dr. Okunola stated this in his paper presentation during a workshop organised in Abuja by the National Population Commission (NPC) in collaboration/support of the World Bank and the Family Health Department of the Federal Ministry of Health.
He expressed worry that currently, Nigeria has the highest under-6 mortality rate in the world despite a rapid decline in the last 60 years, causing women to have more children in the hope that more of them survive beyond childhood, adding that by 2050 if Nigeria’s total fertility rate continues to be high there will be an additional 130 million poor people in the country.
He stressed the need for Nigeria to take the path of ”business unusual reforms” to enable a demographic transition through macro economic reform in terms of subsidy removal with monies saved from that targeted at the poor and vulnerable across the country.
According to him, countries that were able to achieve demographic dividends, Universal Health Coverage(UHC), Universal Basic Education (UBE) explored the public financing strategy, stressing that Nigeria must embrace this if she must achieve human capital development.
”A country that has a population structure in the traditional pyramidal shape has lots of dependents, lots of children conceptualized as the working population, in other words you have one working person catering for over 50 people and that’s a high dependency ratio.
”If you look at another pyramid which is inverted we have more workers to less dependents, that in itself is what we call a country reaping a dividend but having that change from a pyramid that is normally standing to a pyramid that is upside down does not happen automatically.
”It happens when the country embraces the business unusual reform because when you have more workers to less dependents there would be more money for you, enough money to take care of your children and even have savings to reap a second dividend in the future,” he explained.
”Without public financing you are unable to guarantee universal health coverage, universal basic education unable to guarantee all of those things that drive human capital development.
”Right now there is a lot of private financing going into education. It is a panacea for disaster. It is a different conversation when children are sent to school with public financing,” he said.
”Public financing is key to accelerated human capital development and accumulation of health education and social protection. It is even more important because the number of poor and vulnerable is rising and their needs must be prioritized, he stressed.
Okunola therefore harped the need for more girls to be enrolled into school, saying girl child education and women empowerment will reduce child mortality rate and fertility rate among teenage girls.
”If we make that schooling compulsory, publicly financed and mandatory we probably will be talking less of family planning but today the schools are not available, girls are still getting pregnant and by the time they get to 15 they have 5-6 children.
”If you don’t give voice to the woman she will be unable to stand for her child to go to school because what we see especially from the northern states is if a girl manages to complete primary school she is married off, but if you empower the mother and she has some resources of her own the potential of her looking for a brighter future for her kids is assured. These are things that countries that moved from normal pyramid to inverted pyramid were able to do,” he said.
