Open Data Party has come and gone but the feedback we received from the event which took place in Kano in November 2016 live with us as an organisation. From the event, it was found out that our community champions need more community gathering which will be a follow the money immersive session. Also, we have been receiving requests such as, “how can we follow the money in our states” and we feel more need to reach out to more communities as they are our major focus.

Finally, our zeal to train more community champions to follow the money in their respective states came to reality as we won the One Award in April 2017 and this to us, means more communities empowered and more community champions championing Follow the Money.

We officially kickstarted our training in North East Nigeria as we Follow the Money to Maiduguri, Borno State which is the epicentre of the Boko Haram crisis in Nigeria. The decision to start our training in Maiduguri was borne out of passion for communities to follow the money meant for the rehabilitation of the displaced persons in the region as increase in the inflows of aid is made possible by the Oslo Humanitarian Conference of 2016 so that the funds won’t be mismanaged like the aid gotten in the past years in tune to more than $30bn.   

The North East mapping event, in partnership with Exit Lanes, took place on 17th and 18th of May in Maiduguri. It had a turnout of 138 participants from the six states in the North East region of the country (Borno, Taraba, Gombe, Adamawa, Yobe and Bauchi). In a post evaluation of the 2 -day training, 75% of the total respondents (32 number of them)  said they are now aware of fund flows to their states, where to find the information and how to Follow the Money.

CODEs co-founder, Oludotun Babayemi set the ball rolling on Day 1 by officially opening the training event, setting the event on a high tempo. He spoke extensively and intently about the dangers of not engaging government of which he painted an imaginary picture of what Borno state would be in 2030 if everyone seated in the room got involved. This tempo was however maintained all through the event.

The training sequence had a back to back approach, with adequate time allotted for questions and answers, there was a break after every session for participants to stretch and also give them time to internalise the information received, as well as the ample time to rest before other sessions came up. Tea break availed participants various opportunities to bond and explore areas of strategic interest to them.

Every session was practical, as various dialogue points came out of the questions asked, participants were taken through what Connected Development represents and how they could plug into the various models of the organisation in engaging and emancipating their communities, they were also made to engage in the process of identifying money to follow, hashtagging campaigns and connecting to our social media platforms, the right ways to take videos and pictures during community outreaches was also emphasised and done practically. In addition, the process of visualisation, tracking and advocacy, was emphasised.

On day 2, participants were grouped into their various states (participants from Borno – the host state had 3 groups) to find potential campaigns they could follow in the coming weeks. It was great to know that 7 campaigns were highlighted at the end of the session, with participants showing high interest in following the money of projects already identified.

Follow the Money Team in Fashir Interviewing the community stakeholder

We would not have visited Maiduguri without a community outreach to a rural community. This time we were in Fashir, where a  6 -year old abandoned health facility has been turned into a storehouse, and a shelter for animals. “At one time, we reached out to the contractor of this project, but he told us he could not finish the project because the state government has not provided adequate funding for the completion of the project”. After 1 hour of focus group discussions, the community mobilised themselves and were ready to engage the local government chairman and the state commissioner for health.

24 hours travel on road from Abuja, 138 participants, 2 days of great work, and 7 campaigns can be such an adventure for us at Connected Development, as we look forward to furthering outcomes from the campaigns identified. Moreover, the enthusiasm amongst participants to start their Follow the Money chapter was quite overwhelming, and something to look forward to in the coming months. Wondering when we will be in your state or region? Do join us at http://ifollowthemoney.org to be the first to know.

[The DG of Budget Office, Ben Akabueze making a  presentation during the Budget Transparency and Accountability Workshop]

It is widely accepted that transparency in government leads to the generation of government accountability since it allows citizens of a democracy to reduce government corruption, bribery and other malfeasance, and control their government. It is also widely accepted that an open, transparent government allows for the dissemination of information and proceedings of government, which in turn forces government to be accountable, helps to guarantee societal progress and effective public oversight, while ensuring participation.

There have been several transparency, accountability and participation movements all over the world. Such movements in developing countries have more justifications for clamouring for such as a result of poor governance, systemic wrecking of public funds, public records inaccessibility and impecunious citizen participation in governance. As a result, citizens of such countries have found it increasingly difficult to hold their governments to account.

This is the case of Nigeria, where several non-profits and movements have been pushing for greater governmental accountability and transparency. And for the first time since the history of the country, the present administration made a striking commitment by signing unto the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The OGP is a multilateral and multi-stakeholder initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from national governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, harness new technologies to strengthen governance and fight corruption. Nigeria getting on-board the partnership through President Buhari’s commitment to such resulted in a synthesis of government and civil society efforts to realize open government in the country.

Currently, Nigeria just started implementing the National Action Plan (NAP), a key process of the OGP. The plan has 4 commitments that both the government and civil society have made and are implementing across ensuring fiscal transparency, fighting corruption, improving citizenry access to information and citizen engagement.

In line with these developments, the Budget Office of the Federation (BoF) and the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative organized a workshop on budget transparency and accountability on 9 May 2017 at Transcorp Hilton Hotels, Abuja. In attendance were several international and domestic stakeholders from the government, civil society and private sector. The workshop was organized to allow the Nigerian government examine how it can bolster transparency and participation outcomes in the country with focus on budget transparency – how budget information can be made more accessible, how to move forward in implementing reforms that improves Nigeria’s Open Budget Index Score (OBIS).

The workshop majorly kicked off through a presentation by the Director-General of BoF on Transparency, Accountability and Participation: Reforms and Why It Matters. He used his presentation to highlight progresses made on open government in the country, detailing the OGP and its NAP Commitments. He also mentioned that an area that requires commitments and attention of all relevant stakeholders is Nigeria’s OBIS which as at 2015 was at number 24 on the ranking under insufficient. He also mentioned that in a bid to counter such embarrassing trend, the BoF is on the verge of commissioning the Citizen’s Budget Portal where citizens would have timely information of budget processes including contracting and implementation. In addition, the portal will have further contents such as the BoF Help Desk and Hot Lines to take questions from the general public on budget issues and implementation.

This was followed by a presentation by Atiku Samuel of BudgIT on the Status of Budget Transparency in Nigeria. He took his time to explain the international standards of budget transparency and how the OBIS is measured. After this was a session on How to Make Budget Data More Accessible by Atzimba Baltazar of COMETA. She emphasised the need for a Citizen’s budget which should be a few paged document on governmental revenues, debts and expenditure in a fiscal year using infographics and cartoons to simplify understanding for the citizenry. She lifted lessons Nigeria could learn from countries such as Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa where citizen’s budgets are already been issued out.

The last session was a group discussion on 3 key questions: 1). Do you have enough information on the budget? 2). Who do you go to access the information and 3). How do you prefer to access this information? The resolutions after the group discussions on the questions, respectively, are:

1). Yes, while we have information on the budget including the Medium Term Expenditure Framework, Budget Proposal, Appropriation Act, Budget Implementation Reports etc. the problem is that accessibility to these documents atimes are not timely. Most of them are not in open source formats. Most of the budget line items are not detailed enough, and ultimately, a lay man would not be able to understand the technicalities on most of these documents. 2). It was generally agreed that this should be from the Budget Office, Ministry of Finance and few other primarily concerned MDAs. 3). In open source format – the citizen’s budget and the citizen’s budget portal will go a long way in assisting in this regard.

While one must applaud the BoF and the present administration on efforts to use open government as a tool in fighting corruption, increasing participation and ensuring effective public oversight, there should be sufficient governmental political will in implementing the NAP, other consequent commitments and responding to Freedom of Information (FOI) Requests. For CODE (Follow The Money), the citizen’s budget portal will be largely utilitarian in accessing key budget information for rural communities which we fail to access on time even through piles of FOI requests. Such will enable us take such details down to rural communities and in building their capacity for effective public oversight, ensuring service delivery and in holding their governments accountable.

Chambers Umezulike is a Programme Manager at Connected Development and a Development Expert. He spends most of his time writing and choreographing researches on good and economic governance. He tweets via @Prof_Umezulike.

The follow the Money team was given 20min slot to speak about what we do in two events at the University of Ilorin.

The first event was co-organized by the Canvassity Pan African Youth Democracy and The Post-Graduate School of the Faculty of Life Science Student while the second event which was supposed to hold was organised by Junior Chamber Internation (JCI Unilorin) but, did not later hold due to logistics reason by the organiser (JCI Unilorin)

The theme of the event was “Understanding Democracy: How to Leverage the Power of Technology and Social Media to Engage the Government and Increase Impactful Youth Engagement”.

The event which took place on the 29th of April, 2017 was very strategic for our team as it comes at a time we are planning to reach out to all the geopolitical zones in Nigeria by training them on how to Follow the Money. 

As such, starting from Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria will be instrumental to our work as we intend to reach out to the consciousness of the youth population in the academic community. Engaging this category of youths will drive intellectual change and conversation around development, governance and Transparency & Accountability.

Though the turnout for the event wasn’t as massive as we had earlier thought, but nonetheless – the message got to, and sank deep into the hearts of the participants as they all wanted to leverage on the Follow the Money Platform to empower their respective communities.

“Where have you guys been all this while?” That statement was echoed by the majority of the participants as they were all wowed about what we have been doing.

Akinsuyi who was one of the participants gave his remarks saying “An eye-opening presentation, but I think it is not for someone who wants to live long”.

In his remarks to feedbacks given by Akinsuyi, Busayo Morakinyo of Connected Development engaged him emphasising on the fact that “we cannot all be mute and watch things go by as we all need to be proactive and ask the right questions from the government, so we can all see and achieve the Nigeria of our dreams”

One of the participants who did not want his name in print raised a salient concern as he asked if  Follow the Money would not turn apolitical by the time it gain grounds and I discussed extensively on the nonpartisan traits of the organization and gave him assurance about the fact that we remained firm and resolute on our nonpartisan stand. Also, I was able to let him realised we cannot be a watchdog for the government and at the same time be romancing with them.

While explaining the more, I iterated and let the participant understand that if the organisation was a political one or has a political motive/s, it would not have stood the test of time since 2012 that it was founded. 

The event ended with a good understanding of what we do and how the participants can sign up to be a part of the organisation. More of this training will continue until we are able to reach out to all Tertiary institutions in Nigeria, creating systems and deep-rooted thoughts on transparency and accountability. The event ended with commitments from the participants as they indicated their interest to join our Follow the Money Platform. 

If truly we are serious about Following the Money, then, we should be able to train the next generation of leaders to be proactive and always speak up and most importantly, they too need to start Following the Money.  This is one of the major reasons why we are on the train of training to the tertiary institutions. Look out for our train in the various campuses around Nigeria. We will keep you posted the more, as it is happening.

If you know of any event on social development, transparency and accountability which you would want us to talk about what we do and possible recruitment of Follow the Money enthusiasts, do not hesitate to comment or reach out to our team.

[During one of our townhall meetings at Uratta Umuoha Community, Abia State – a key social accountability strategy through which we have enabled communities organize stakeholder engagements to facilitate the implementation of projects intended for them]

On the 11^th of April 2017, the boardroom of MacArthur Foundation Nigeria was filled with several civil society actors on accountability, transparency and civic engagement. In attendance were over 30 representatives from domestic non-profits who are MacArthur grantees. They were there for a conversation with two accountability scholars, John Gaventa, and Walter Flores. An event in which staffers of MacArthur Foundation Headquarters joined virtually from the United States, the aim was to share ideas and have grantees move from tactical accountability approaches to more strategic approaches. As one of the representatives of Connected Development [CODE], I went in with several expectations which were met.

The conversation started with a presentation, Dancing the TAP Dance: Linking Transparency, Accountability and Participation, by Prof John Ganveta who teaches at the Institute of Development Studies, United Kingdom. He started with sharing key governance issues that led to the rise of accountability and transparency movement globally. Most of them encompass accountability deficit, democratic deficit and impecunious active citizen participation in governance. He then went on explaining how several tools such as ensuring service delivery, improving budgetary processes, ensuring open government, aid transparency and NGO accountability can be utilitarian in addressing these challenges. Addressing these challenges would consequently lead to better services through monitoring, improved democracy, reduced public service corruption, empowerment, human rights, greater access to information and challenging inequality.

Another presentation, Citizen-led Accountability: Power, Politics and Strategies, was by Dr Walter Flores of Center for the Study of Equity and Governance in Health Systems (CEGSS) who took time to share his organization’s works on accountability and challenging inequalities in Guatemala. He emphasised that the roles of transparency and accountability in curbing inequalities include turning citizens from passive to active users of services who can demand accountability from the government. According to him, when they started, they first of all started collecting data on how a particular faction of the society was being marginalized in getting services in drug stores and hospitals. The data was collected through sms, audio/visual evidence and they embarked on advocacy and engaged the government with such evidence for appropriate response. They also created channels of engagement for such citizens to discuss problems and implement solutions.

At a time, politics came into play and they were challenged by governmental authorities for not having the legitimacy to advocate for the communities. They then were forced to decentralize their operations to let citizens and communities lead it through their building capacities. Communities were then organized for monitoring. In a presentation in which he shared most of their successes, he finalized by stating that social accountability is crucial for accountability to work. And that in such work, it’s better to start with community organizing and rights literacy, while collective and participatory interventions, strategies and results are imperative.

After the phenomenal presentations were questions, comments and commitments from organizations present. In line with Dr Flores presentation, I made a remark on the effectiveness of his social accountability strategy which we use at CODE. At CODE, in tracking governmental expenditure in rural communities for service delivery, we start with rights literacy in the concerned communities and co-organize town hall meetings with their community leaders for conversation around the particular projects with implementing governmental agencies and contractors. The town hall meetings have helped to embed community ownership in our works and within the chain of our participatory strategies, communities are empowered to ensure these projects are implemented long after we have pulled out. Also in the same line, for sustainability, decentralization of our strategies and community ownership, we activated ifollowthemoney.org to mobilize young people in these communities to ensure governmental accountability themselves.

The conversation was quintessential and more of it are crucial with respect to capacity building of the civil society and sharing of ideas.

Chambers Umezulike is a Programme Manager at Connected Development and a Development Expert. He spends most of his time writing and choreographing researches on good and economic governance. He tweets via @Prof_Umezulike.

Connected Development [CODE] has won the ONE Africa 2016 Award recognizing, rewarding, and advancing the exceptional work of organisations, founded by Africans and based in Africa, dedicated to helping Africa achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

It’s initiative, Follow The Money, the largest volunteer grassroots movement on transparency and accountability in Africa, emerged winner among three finalists, presented by Bono, the lead singer of the UK group U2, and co-founder of ONE Campaign, during the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Governance forum, that was held on Saturday, April 8, 2017 in Marrakech, Morocco.

The Chief Executive of Connected Development, Hamzat Lawal on behalf of the organization, received the award. The Award highlights the dynamism and achievements of African groups and organisations that are building a better future for their communities, countries and continent. “We are super excited to be the recipient of this award and also thankful to ONE Campaign for this great opportunity. This Award restates the continental belief in our rural development works. This we warmly appreciate. And ultimately, this is timely and will be exceedingly utilitarian in broadening our continental impacts through facilitating development in marginalized communities, as well as empowering them to stand up and hold their leaders accountable.” said Lawal who also doubles as the Co-Founder of Follow The Money.

The 2017 Governance Forum which focused on violent extremism and migration, participation and democracy, inclusive economic growth and jobs for youth.  brought together various thought leaders in Africa and the World at Large including the Emir of Kano, HRH Sanusi Lamido Sanusi; the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed; Former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan; Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, Former Finance Minister, Okonjo Iweala, Africa Development Bank President, Akinwunmi Adeshina, among other dignitaries.

For any press enquiries

Celestina Obiekea

Tel: +234-09-291-7545

Email: celestina@connecteddevelopment.org

Editor’s Note:

Connected Development [CODE] is a non-government organization [NGO] whose mission is to improve access to information and empower local communities in Africa. Our initiative, Follow The Money advocate, visualize and track government spending and international aid spending in rural communities.

Every year since 1950, the world has celebrated April 7th as World Health Day. So, in essence, we have had over sixty decades of this celebration. The question I ask myself however is “has this yearly celebration impacted Nigerian and indeed global health in any way?”

When I think about the fact that in this age and time, Nigeria is still grappling with communicable diseases as cholera, meningitis and malaria, that Nigeria still contributes 10% to global maternal mortality or that we lose over 2,000 under five year olds daily and I am greatly saddened. Only now are we even beginning to consider tackling non-communicable diseases such as cancer, hypertension, mental illness etc. The picture I see daily of our Health system is that we have had and still have governments who do not care much about the health of its people.

From non-functional Primary Healthcare centers to under-equipped or under-staffed ones to teaching hospitals that may not be readily accessible to the majority of citizens or those that even lack the most basic health facilities or instruments… Every day, the picture is that of doom and depression, which brings me to the theme of this year’s World Health day celebration “depression: let’s talk”.

It is all too important for us to talk about depression in Nigeria because even our health system causes one to be depressed most times! Imagine if you live in a community of over 5,000 inhabitants and there is no functional Primary Healthcare facility in that community, so people in the community have to either recourse to private health facilities where they will have to pay through their noses, further pushing them into poverty or travel long distances to the nearest public health institution (imagine if there was an emergency!).

On another hand, let us even say you do not live in a rural community; you live in a city where all the public health facilities are functional with top line facilities. Alas! A patient is rushed into the hospital on an emergency and is left unattended to until he/she dies or even that there is no doctor to attend to the patient because all doctors are on strike for unpaid salaries or the patient is in need of oxygen and there is no oxygen in the entire hospital. I am certain there are many who can relate to most or all of these scenarios (I can because I have been in some of these situations myself).

women waiting to receive medical care outside a Primary Healthcare Center photo credit: Nigerianeye.com

Beyond all of these instances and storytelling is the fact that there is an urgent need for a revamping of the Nigerian Health system which a lot of health advocates (me included) will argue should begin with putting more money into the health sector. Unarguably, it is true that the Nigerian health sector is largely underfunded but beyond increased funding, there should also be increased transparency in how the funds are being utilized. It is pertinent that before we insist that more money be put in, we demand for explanations and visible proof of how current funds are being expended so that we do not end up funding that same corruption we are claiming to fight by giving it more money in the end.

As citizens, one of the key roles we have to play is in holding our government accountable to its responsibilities. By voting them into power, we sign a social contract with them where we as citizens get to play our part and they as government get to play their part. So, do not just sit back and complain, get involved, get interested in the issues and arm yourself with adequate information, join a community of like-minded people and ACT now!

To join our growing community of activists who are working tirelessly to ensure transparency and accountability in how public funds are being expended, go to www.ifollowthemoney.org and request an invite. Let us work together to change the face of governance and healthcare administration in our beloved country.

On 29 and 30 March 2017, the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice through its Civil Society Advocacy to Support Anti-Corruption in Nigeria organised a 2-day workshop to build the capacity of selected CSOs and journalists on the concept of Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the implementation United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) in Nigeria including the second UNCAC review process. The workshop was also for enhancing the capacity of the invited organizations in their policy advocacy and engagement with relevant agencies of government around the issues.

In attendance were around 30 persons from mainly civil society organisations, including focal persons for the UNCAC review and OGP from EFCC, TUGAR and Ministry of Justice who were invited to the opening ceremony.

Highlights of the workshop include, first, the identification and use of red flags to monitor procurement processes session led by the personnel of Bureau of Public Procurement. He used the session to bring to the fore, key processes of procurement from the planning stage to evaluation, explaining how contracts are awarded, how contractors bid and how one can file a petition if not comfy with the bidding outcome. He also displayed to the participants, key pages of the open contracting website portal (being developed) through which all information on procurement and contracting from all federal agencies will be accessed online.

Secondly, there was a session on UNCAC Review Process and Mechanism with focus on chapters 2 and 5 of the convention. Chapter 2 was on Preventable Measures on Corruption while 5 was on Assets Recovery. The role of CSOs in the review process was also highlighted and discussed.

Thirdly and ultimately was a session on the OGP, led by Mr Stanley Acholonu of BudgIT. He used the session to highlight the 4 themes on Nigeria’s National Action Plan (NAP), a plan to be implemented in 2 years. The themes are Fiscal Transparency, Anti-Corruption, Citizen Engagement and Access to Information. There are 14 commitments under these themes with outcomes, indicators, activities, timeline, responsible institutions etc. He also mentioned of the review regime of the NAP and the importance of CSOs to be in either of the working groups. The latter are 7, namely, Fiscal Transparency, Anti-Corruption, Citizen Engagement and Access to Information, Innovation and Technology, Communications and Monitoring and Evaluation. These working groups are made up of governmental personnel and CSOs that meet regularly to access implementation. The roles of CSOs in the implementation include putting pressure and reminding the government of the commitments, carrying off independent review process and providing assistance to the government in the implementation of the NAP.

The workshop was a phenomenal one. I also met interesting participants and elemental stakeholders from several organizations whose group contributions were so helpful, and offside discussions during tea and lunch breaks, I learnt so much from. The OGP process most especially is the hope of Nigeria to get governance right. I hope we realize most of the commitments within the 2 year window.

Chambers Umezulike is a Programme Manager at Connected Development and a Development Expert. He spends most of his time writing and choreographing researches on good and economic governance. He tweets via @Prof_Umezulike.

Over the last two decades, the issue of climate change and the need for individuals and countries to become more environmental conscious has become a recurring topic with plenty of activities and talks to bring this discussion to the global fore.

One of such activities is the global yearly Earth Hour celebration which is an hourly celebration to ignite the idea of environmental awareness into the minds of people. The celebrations usually consist of various independent activities within an hour when the lights are turned off.

interacting with one of the participants at the event

This year, I had my first experience of Earth Hour celebrations at the CODE event organized at and in partnership with the Hilton hotel, Abuja. This year’s event focused on interacting with the younger generation to get their perspective on the theme as well as ignite their passion towards environmental sustainability. I found this particularly interesting and inspiring as this goes to disrupt the popular cliché that “youths are the leaders of tomorrow”. As a fan of disruptive thinking, I personally think that “youths are the leaders of today” and we are not reminded of this fact often enough. So it was an awesome time, getting to listen to some of the brilliant things the young people had to say.

the students during the panel discussion

Highlights of the event included a panel discussion where students of The Hillside School and The American International school shared some very interesting perspectives into what they thought about Nigeria’s current energy crisis, her role in contributing to climate change via carbon emissions from being unilaterally energy dependent and a heavy user of carbon energy sources such as crude oil and some key recommendations on ways to diversify Nigeria’s energy sources by harnessing the resources abundant in the various regions such as solar and wind energies in the North and hydro power in the South and West. The students also talked about interesting ways they as individuals and their schools were contributing to raise environmental sustainability awareness and changing climate change such as reducing, reusing and recycling materials such as papers, not powering the generator for whole days and researching into generating energy from biological wastes such as urine i.e. biofuel production.

The whole event for me was particularly significant because even though I am very much aware of the fact that climate change is a real issue that affects almost every socio-economic aspect of human life including health, economy and agriculture (which I will talk about in a later post), I really would not consider myself an environmental sustainability activist but after the event, I am positively inspired to be more of an advocate for mother Earth as we should all be. After all, if we do not take care of our Earth, who will?

The saving one million lives Initiative was launched in October 2012, in response to the poor health outcomes in the country especially for mothers and children. Thus,the program is intended to improve the lives of mothers and children through a result based partnership with States ministries of health.

On the 16th of March, the team at CODE met with Dr. Ibrahim Kana the Program manager of Saving One Million Lives Program for Results to get an extensive elucidation of how the program is being run and what it entails.
Dr Ibrahim and his team excitedly aligning us on how ($500 million) credit that had been negotiated by Federal government with World Bank from which $1.5million was disbursed to states and FCT as grants, sought to deliver high impact, evidence based and cost effective health interventions based on 6 ‘pillars’, namely:-

– Maternal, newborn and child health;
– childhood essential medicines and increasing treatment of important childhood diseases;
– improving child nutrition;
– immunization
– malaria control; and
– the prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV.

He stated that the states were receiving 82% of the money and the program unit is not involved in the spending of the money, also that the SOML Program involves reorienting the discussion of service delivery to results rather than just inputs, establishing a limited set of clear and measurable indicators by which to track success, strengthening data collection so that these indicators can be measured more frequently, bolstering accountability so that managers and health workers at all levels are engaged to achieve better results and fostering innovations that increase the focus on results and include greater openness to working with private sector.

He highlighted that The Program for Result is an approach to structuring of flow of resources to pay for results, outcomes and inputs and under it, states will be rewarded for their performance based on objective indicators using data from household and health facility survey as well as achievement of certain process indicators related to implementation of a performance management system. The program is placed in the Federal Ministry of Health and will be overseen by a Steering Committee chaired by the Honourable Minister of Health and comprising representatives from the state’s commissioner of health which is ultimately responsible for achieving the PforR indicators and ensuring stakeholders’ focus on objectively verified results.
The PforR will provide funds to the federal and state governments based on a set of five Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs) which are;

DLI 1.- Increasing Utilization of High Impact Reproductive, Child health and Nutrition Interventions; this will include states producing plans for achieving reductions in Maternal and Under 5 Child mortality, Improvements from states’ baseline on key health indicators such as penta 3 vaccination, insecticides treated nets used by children under 5, contraceptive prevalence rate, Vitamin A coverage, Skilled birth attendance and HIV counselling and testing during antenatal care. Lagging states are also encouraged to strengthen their MNCH weeks as part of an impact evaluation.
DLI 2. – Increasing Quality of High impact Reproductive and Child Health and Nutrition Interventions: This entails states improving the quality of care at primary health care facilities

DLI 3 – Improving Monitoring and Evaluation systems and Data Utilization; by conducting SMART surveys in all 36 states and widely disseminating the results.

DLI 4 – Increasing Utilization and Quality of Reproductive and Child Health and Nutrition Interventions Through Private Sector Innovation: A competitive innovation fund was established that supports innovations for techniques and technologies in health service delivery. This is been headed by the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria.

DLI 5- Increasing Transparency in Management and Budgeting for PHC: States are required to transfer health staff to entity responsible for PHC while produce and publishing a consolidated budget execution report covering all income and expenditures for PHC.

Speaking on the disbursement arrangement, he stated that once state earnings have been determined and verified, the PMU will set in motion the disbursement process. As soon as the World Bank receives a withdrawal application, funds will be disbursed to a dedicated account of the Federal Government for transfer to the accounts states have in Central Bank within 30 days.

The meeting with the Program management unit was very insightful, as a lot of questions we earlier came with were clearly answered but that did not leave us without having a few “asks” and recommendation that we hope will enable us at FollowTheMoney to effectively monitor and track the I.5 million dollars allocated to states.

Recommendations from CODE
Civil Society Organizations be included as part of the Independent Verification Agents
the National Orientation Agency should be carried along in sensitizing the general public about the program.

Specific asks from CODE
we asked to obtain a copy of the State’s Implementation Plans.

Ijeoma Oforka is a Program Officer at Connected Development, with a background in Public Health. She is passionate about advocating for the plights and issues surrounding women and girls health and education. She tweets via @ijoforka