By Lydia Kukua Asamoah, GNA
Accra, Dec. 13, GNA - The Government has been called upon to increase domestic funding towards national immunisation programmes and other health initiatives as donor partners gradually weaned-off their support to the country.
Civil Society activists at a roundtable discussion in Accra said since immunisation is a poverty reduction strategy that decreased the magnitude of vaccine-preventable diseases, it was needful for the government to invest “greatly into it to sustain the gains made over the years.
The activists made the call in Accra, where they met to deliberate on the Immunisation Advocacy Initiative (IAI), a three-year advocacy project, meant to impress on the government to increase domestic financing towards immunisation.
The IAI is funded by the African Population Health Research Centre (APHRC) and is being implemented by SEND Ghana and a consortium of other NGOs, namely the Hope for Future Generations (HFFG), the Ghana Registered Midwives Association, Socio-Serve and the West African AIDS Foundation, and the Ghana Coalition of NGOs in Health.
In a contribution, Mrs Cecilia Senoo, Executive Director, HFFG, said most of the interventions within the health sector including; immunisation were mainly donor funded, a source of concern, should the donors pullout anytime.
She said the health and lives of many Ghanaian children would be at risk should donors decide to pullout eventually, as many were doing in most countries.
According to Mrs Senoo, CSOs have a critical role to play in advocating the state to commit more funding into immunisation interventions aside it leading role in such intervention.
She said the state also needed to up its game in meeting its co-financing agreements with international bodies like GAVI, a public–private global health partner committed to increasing access to immunisation globally.
In a presentation on immunisation financing in Ghana, Mr Ebow Dadzie, a Deputy Programme Manager at the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), revealed that Ghana was one of the three countries in the world that did not meet its co- financing commitments with GAVI in 2018.
Mr Dadzie said in spite of the many national efforts, there were high numbers of unimmunised children in the urban and peri-urban areas and other hard to reach communities in the Volta Basin in the country.
He therefore, emphasised the need to improve immunisation coverage in those areas, while strengthening partnership for immunisation coverage and innovative ways of financing health services.
On her part, Ms Gladys Damalin, the Programmes and Advocacy Manager for the Immunisation Advocacy Initiative (IAI), expressed worry that the cost of immunisation was rising without a corresponding increment in government funding.
“The donor influence in immunisation activities in Ghana was immense, but the gains that the Government made in immunisation coverage may not be sustainable if we continue to rely only on donors to fund immunisation,” she said.
Ms Damalin noted that the IAI aims to ensure that the proportion of the budget allocation to immunisation increased yearly in order to ensure thorough immunisation programme nationwide.
She explained that the objective of the CSO roundtable discussions at the national and regional levels was to introduce to stakeholders, the IAI's advocacy agenda and solicit their support on domestic financing for immunisation.
GNA
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