The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Country Representative, Dr David Wilfred Ochan, has said that Ghana’s graduation from a low-income to a lower-income status has contributed to shifts in development assistance for health.
This, he said, had made development partners like UNFPA to move away from annual budget ceilings for government to mandatory co-financing arrangements.
Dr Ochan there proposed a domestic funding and financing model to attain transformative health outcomes.
He said this in a speech read on his behalf by the Deputy UNFPA Representative Dr Emmily Naphambo at a stakeholder’s validation meeting on the ‘business case for investing in family planning (FP), maternal health, gender-based violence (GBV) and child marriage’ held in Accra.
The meeting discussed the findings of a study on the current state of these sectors, identified gaps and opportunities for interventions as well as the benefits of investing in them including potential cost savings, improved health outcomes and enhanced productivity.
According to Dr Ochan Ghana had taken steps to align with the shift and developed the Ghana Beyond Aid Strategy but the vision still calls for a renewed mindset, attitudes and behaviors to reduce Ghana’s dependence on foreign assistance.
“To support Ghana’s vision and align with shifts, there is the need for stakeholders to present compelling evidence on returns in investments that attract governments, private sector and non-traditional partners to invest in areas originally supported largely by donors,” he added.
Dr Ochan cautioned that poor transition by governments to the strategic shifts can result in shortages in financial resources, medical products and supply stock-outs, service disruption, and poor health outcomes.
He therefore urged partners to work collectively and engage relevant decision-makers with policy papers with the investment case.
Presenting the findings on maternal health and family planning, Dr Yaw Atakorah of the Economic Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) indicated that maternal mortality declined substantially between 2007 and 2017.
However, he added that it needs to decline by 77 percent and 37 percent to meet the Sustainable Development Goals(SDG) and national targets, respectively.
He emphasised that there was the need to invest in maternal mortality, adding that in the absence of any intervention to scale up, the rate will only reduce to 257 per 100,000 live births by 2030.
On family planning (FP), Dr. Atakorah said fertility had generally declined. However, rural fertility rates remained substantively higher than urban areas. “Currently married women with unmet need for FP needs to reduce by 17 percent to achieve the national targets. On the other hand, modern FP method use had increased but had not translated into a reduction in traditional methods in recent years”, he added.
Dr Atakorah further stressed that if action was not taken to scale up modern FP services more than 2,600,000 new FP users would not be reached and this could lead to over 1,400,000 unintended pregnancies, 2,500 maternal deaths, and 450,000 unsafe abortions.
Presenting his findings on child marriage (CM) and gender-based violence (GBV), Dr. Eric Arthur of the Economic Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science noted that scaling up interventions would reduce the GBV rate of 33.0 percent in 2024 to 24.5 percent by 2030.
“Reducing GBV prevalence results in economic benefits with positive returns on investments,”he added.
Dr Arthur said scaling up child marriage interventions would avert up to 38,000 and 58,00 cases by 2030, and there are economic benefits with positive returns on investment. He indicated that the most cost-effective interventions to end child marriage should not leave out the communities.
Participants at the meeting emphasized the need for sustainable investment in maternal health, FP, GBV, and child marriage through partnership with the various government agencies being the lead in all the interventions.
By Gertrude Eunice Maasodong