A research report has
revealed that low productivity of workers rather than the availability of
personnel or geographical structures are the factors responsible for poor
service delivery in Nigeria’s education and health sectors.
While appealing for
increased spending, the study, which was conducted by the World Bank in
partnership with the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) and the
African Development Bank Group (ADB), suggested improved services to address
the identified issues.
At a two-day workshop with the media and civil
society organisations in Abuja, which was organised by AERC and the Nigerian
Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Dr Opeyemi Fadeyibi, Service
Delivery Indicators Field Coordinator at the World Bank, said: “Low
productivity of workers may be attributed to several causes including low
levels of technical knowledge required to deliver services, low levels of
provider effort, lack of motivation to work and absence of necessary input to
deliver services.”
The overall objective of the SDI
project is to gauge the quality of service delivery in primary education and
basic health services and to provide a set of
robust measures for benchmarking service delivery performance in Africa. It is expected that this will
enable the governments and citizens identify gaps and to track progress over
time. It is envisaged that the high public awareness and persistent focus on
these indicators will mobilise policymakers, citizens, service providers and
donors to ensure and enforce accountability along the service delivery value
chains.
The workshop was organised to create high
level public awareness about the state of quality of service delivery in health
and education sectors in Nigeria in order to sensitise the media and civil society
organisations to support the process of bringing about positive change in
service delivery performance and possible policy actions for better quality
service delivery in the two critical sectors.
The education survey was conducted in four
states – Anambra, Ekiti, Niger and Bauchi – with data collected in June 2013.
It focused on primary schools, teachers and publics, while the Federal Ministry
of Education assisted the World Bank in the exercise.
The result revealed that school absence rate
was 13.7 per cent in the entire sample area with public schools recording 16.9
per cent absence rate as against 5.5 per cent for private schools. Reasons for
absence by the teachers included field trip (25.7 per cent), illness (19.9%),
retrieving salary (10.2 per cent) and maternity leave (9.2 per cent).
In the area of teacher competence, only 36.8
per cent of the surveyed teachers were found competent in Mathematics and
another 46.3 per cent in English Language, while a mere 15.3 per cent
demonstrated ability in pedagogy.
The health sector survey was conducted between
June 2013 and January 2014 in 12 states with a random selection of two states
for each of the six geo-political zones. These are: Osun, Ekiti, Anambra, Imo, Bayelsa, Cross River, Kebbi, Kaduna, Bauchi,
Taraba, Nasarawa and Kogi States. The Federal Ministry of Health assisted the
World Bank to conduct the survey which focused on primary health care, secondary facilities,
health care providers and end users of health care.
The study revealed
that only 19.8 per cent of the sample area professionals with ability to manage
maternal and newborn complication. Specifically, there were 33.2 percent
medical doctors across the sample area, 23.9 per cent nurses or midwifes, 13.6
per cent community health workers and 12.4 per cent other professionals.
For availability of
drugs, health posts had 46.9 per cent, 47.3 per cent for health centres and 63
per cent in the hospitals, while hospitals scored only 1.8 per cent of
vaccines.
AERC stated that
availability of infrastructure such as toilets, clean water and electricity was
a key challenge, especially the availability of improved toilets, which stands
at merely 34 per cent of health facilities.
Mr Obadia Miroro,
Assistant Knowledge Manager at AERC, said that about 51 per cent of health
facilities had met the minimum medical equipment requirements, which included a
thermometer, any weighing scale, sphygmomanometer, stethoscope for health
posts, and additionally sterilising equipment and a refrigerator for health centres
and hospitals. Health facilities, on average, had 49 percent of all essential
drugs available at time of the survey.
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