The COVID-19 pandemic took the world by surprise, revealing a global failure to invest in pandemic preparedness and thus teaching the global health community a lot of health security lessons.
While Nigeria, like most African countries, has not suffered from the worst effect of the pandemic, unlike its European and American counterparts, the Nigerian government has made some blunders and faced some challenges in managing the virus.
PREMIUM TIMES highlighted five of those challenges in an earlier  published report.
This has prompted calls for national leaders and actors to urgently consider strategies to rebuild resilience to such crises, especially by raising the bar for health security financing and accountability mechanisms for coordinated, well-planned responses.
Nigeria is particularly a hotbed of infectious diseases. The country’s tropical climate, population density, socioeconomic realities and high cross-border movement provide a conducive environment for such diseases to thrive.
In view of these ever-present threats, the Legislative Initiative for Sustainable Development (LISDEL) recently hosted a one-day multi-sectoral forum on Epidemic Preparedness and Response (EPR) Financing.
With the theme: ‘Raising the accountability bar for health security financing in Nigeria,’ the workshop was part of LISDEL’s Prevent Epidemics (PE) project; funded by Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) with the aim of boosting domestic spending on EPR.
Held in Abuja, the highlights of the event include two panel sessions: raising the accountability bar for public, private sector and donor investment in EPR; and improving Investment in EPR.
According to the organisers, some key objectives of the programme are to deepen the knowledge of key stakeholders on National Action Plan on Health Security (NAPHS) in Nigeria; and to engender an enabling environment for health security policy and financing in Nigeria through effective stakeholder engagement.
