A research by World Bank has revealed that low productivity of workers is largely responsible for poor service delivery in Nigeria’s education and health sectors.
The research, conducted by the World Bank in partnership with the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) and the African Development Bank Group (ADB), suggested increased spending and improved services to address the identified issues.
Dr Opeyemi Fadeyibi, the Service Delivery Indicators Field Coordinator at the World Bank, Presented the findings of the research at a two-day workshop with the media and civil society organisations in Abuja.
Fadeyibi said at the workshop, organised by AERC and the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), that “low productivity of workers may be attributed to 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 are other factors.’’
He noted that the overall objective of the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) project was to gauge the quality of service delivery in primary education and basic health services and to provide robust measures for benchmarking service delivery performance in Africa.
He said “it is expected that this will enable governments and citizens to identify gaps and to track progress over time.
“It is envisaged that 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.”
He noted that 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.
It was also 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, he said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the education research was conducted in Anambra, Ekiti, Niger and Bauchi states, 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 the teachers’ absence 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 from each of the six geo-political zones.
The states are Osun, Ekiti, Anambra, Imo, Bayelsa, Cross River, Kebbi, Kaduna, Bauchi, Taraba, Nasarawa and Kogi States.
The Federal Ministry of Health which assisted the World Bank to conduct the survey, 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 were 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 stood at merely 34 per cent of health facilities.
Mr Obadia Miroro, the Assistant Knowledge Manager at AERC, said about 51 per cent of health facilities had met the minimum medical equipment requirements, which included a thermometer, weighing scale, sphygmomanometer, stethoscope for health posts, and sterilising equipment and refrigerator for health centres and hospitals.
Health facilities, on average, had 49 per cent of all essential drugs available at time of the survey. (NAN)
