Director, Health, Ministry of Local Government Affairs, Kaduna State.
“Prior to 2012, there was no specific policy for the creation of budget line for family planning. It was left at the discretion of local governments and as they desire, they may or may not make any budgetary provisions for FP. However, the story is now different as a result of the close collaboration between the Kaduna State Ministry for Local Government Affairs and NURHI after series of discussions and advocacy, the Ministry found it necessary to create a budget line for family planning across all 23 LGAs in the states, so the budget line was created for 2012 budget. Each local government was given N500, 000 for family planning services in 2012 budget. Subsequently, some of the local governments were able to utilize the funds but others for one reason or the other could not access the funds because in 2012, the local government had a lot of funding challenges.”
In 2013, looking at the situation of the economy in the country and the need for family planning and following several discussions with NURHI, the Ministry of Local Government decided to increase the budget line for family planning from N500,000 to N1 million for each of the 23 local government of the state, so all 23 LGAs have a budget line for family planning services and we expect that we would not have any problem with the State House of Assembly in approving the budget line to be utilized for family planning services’. This was an unprecedented change in FP funding, from zero funding in 2010 to the creation of a budget line of N1,000,000.
