70% of Nigeria’s HIV response from donors — NACA
The Director-General of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Dr Sani Aliyu said 70 % of funding for the national HIV/AIDS response in the country is done by donors.
Speaking when he visited the head office of Media Trust Limited, publisher of Daily Trust and other titles yesterday in Abuja, he said only 27 % is from local funding.
Aliyu said: “This is amazing, for a problem that is a Nigeria problem and here we are depending solely on external funds. Only about 27 percent comes from local funding, partly from Federal Government and from few States, and the private sector provides about two percent. That shows that if we have problems with our partners, and we are cut off, that means about 700,000 people will be off treatment and that is a national security risk.”
He said it costs about N50, 000 to deliver HIV care to a patient in a year, adding that the agency was pushing for HIV inclusion in the States Health Insurance Scheme.
Dr Aliyu said the country faces the challenge of sustainability of the whole programme, and that the agency is working with National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and the office of the Minister of Health for a sustainable arrangement.
The NACA boss also decried the practice among States that only include HIV testing instead of treatment in their schemes saying that such states were not doing the patients any favour if they were not committed to treatment.
He said the agency was working towards conducting a single population based survey to ascertain the true HIV prevalence rate in the country.