The Member of Parliament for the Nabdam constituency and Deputy Ranking Member of the Health Committee, Dr. Mark Kurt Nawaane, has revealed that Ghana risks losing about $30 million from global donor funds for the battle against Tuberculosis (TB) for defaulting to honour its counterpart funding.
He said Ghana as a Nation has pledged to contribute a certain amount of money in support of the fight against TB but has defaulted as it failed to make sufficient budgetary allocations to augment what it receives from the Global Fund.
“Ghana is at a crossroads so far as the TB funding is concerned, and that is the counterpart funding that the government is supposed to pay for the Global Fund to also add their own is not coming. In other words, the government is supposed to spend some money on TB to buy drugs and diagnostic materials to take care of the patients, but it has defaulted. He stated
The Member of Parliament added that “this is a commitment that the government of Ghana has made to the world donor organisation that we are going to spend this amount on TB every year, and what the government has promised itself is not doing it”.
This, he noted, has triggered the Global Fund, which is threatening to withdraw its support for the country in the fight against TB, which has overtaken HIV/AIDS and malaria as far as public health was concerned.
He revealed this when he spoke to Mark Smith on A1 Radio’s Daybreak Upper East show following his return as a sole representative at this year’s African parliamentary TB caucus summit in Nairobi, Kenya.
The summit, which was a gathering of health committees of the various Parliaments on the continent, was to agree on a common stance for an increase in funding at the world summit scheduled for New York, USA, in September this year.
He bemoaned that despite the disease being a diagnosable and treatable condition, less attention was paid to it as the government made no budgetary allocation to help fight the disease.
Dr. Nawaane said in 2022, the world recorded 10.6 million infections, of which 1.6 million people died, necessitating the need for the government to pay serious attention to the fight against the disease.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Gilbert Azeem Tiroog|Ghana
