This week, my Wellbeing Foundation Africa’s partners at Amref Health Africa led an excellent session – “A Health Accountability Framework, Holding Governments Accountable for their Health Commitments” . I warmly welcomed the discussion of the importance of supporting strong accountability frameworks, such as the Right to Health Index, that can hold governments to account on their health commitments.

The Right To Health Index is grounded in the recognition that health accountability needs to move away from using general statistics and focus instead on identifying specific indicators for use in human rights. In doing so, accountability frameworks can facilitate the realization of health as a human right and universal health coverage for all.

Health as a human right has always been central to The Wellbeing Foundation Africa’s work, particularly the infusion of poverty alleviation, rights and gender-based programming into the WBFA’s Alaafia Universal Health Coverage Scheme Fund in partnership with the PharmAccess Foundation and Hygeia Community Health Plan.

The Fund, supported the Kwara State Health Insurance Scheme established since 2007 by advocating for the 2012 and 2017 enabling state health insurance legislation, and by directly providing yearly capacitation fees for 5000 pregnant and newly delivered women, as well as adolescents, people living with HIV/AIDS, and elderly beneficiaries annually, within it’s over 100,000 enrollees from 2015 onwards.

Certainly, this availability of quality affordable care has contributed in no small measure to Kwara State maintaining its status as the state with the lowest maternal and under-5 mortality in Nigeria, at a time when the nation has been confronted with the unfortunate fact of having overtaken India as having the highest and worst preventable deaths of mothers and their young children globally – underscoring the importance of sustaining focused efforts across all 36 states of the federation to arrest this devastating trend of neglect.

H.E. Senator Dr Abubakar Bukola Saraki, MBBS, CON, 13th President of the Senate and Chair, 8th Session National Assembly, Federal Republic of Nigeria, Former Kwara State Governor and Chair, Nigeria Governors Forum, at the Scale Up Ceremony of Kwara Community Health Insurance Scheme, Afon, Kwara State, 2009

I was also delighted to learn this week that the health insurance scheme has been recently re-launched with a target of 10,000 more mandatory enrollees. I heartily commend the PharmAccess Foundation and other partners for their focused tenacity in ensuring that the exemplary health insurance-driven universal health coverage model that all partners worked so hard to create and innovate, driven by the mutual vision of H.E Dr Abubakar Bukola Saraki  and the late acclaimed global health expert and medical research scientist Joep Lange to render affordable quality health care for all will continue to support and benefit many more people into the future.