At the World Health Summit in Berlin, global health leaders gathered under one clear message: spending on health is not a cost to be managed, it is an investment to be made. The summit, themed "From Crisis to Resilience: Innovating for Health", put that argument front and center. For Nigeria, the timing could not be more pointed.
Nigeria currently allocates just 2% of its national budget to health. To put that in perspective, African governments agreed back in 2001, through the Abuja Declaration, to commit 15% of their budgets to health. More than two decades later, Nigeria has not come close, sitting at less than a third of that target.
The gap between commitment and reality is not just a policy failure. It shows up in hospital waiting rooms, in maternal mortality rates, in the quiet exodus of Nigerian doctors and nurses seeking better conditions abroad. A country cannot build a productive economy on a population that lacks reliable access to care.
The conversation coming out of Berlin is one Nigeria needs to be having loudly at home. Health infrastructure is economic infrastructure. Roads move goods; functional health systems move people into productive, stable lives. The question is whether Nigeria's budget will ever reflect that truth.
Originally published by AllAfrica.