Global financiers approve $143m grant to help Nigeria contain tuberculosis

The Global Fund in partnership with African Union on Thursday announced approval of grants worth $143 million for Nigeria to shore up its health system to effectively respond and contain Tuberculosis for the next three years.

According to the financiers, COVID-19 pandemic has jeopardised global efforts to save millions of lives and provide access to essential TB care and prevention, noting that health systems are overstretched due to the unprecedented global health emergency, leading to serious restrictions in access to TB diagnosis, treatment, and prevention services.

“Globally, these disruptions could result in an additional 6.3 million people developing tuberculosis and 1.4 million additional deaths resulting from TB between 2020 and 2025,” says financiers.

Nigeria alongside with Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia are the countries benefiting from Africa.

“In the next three years, we will be investing about $12.7 million around the world, in low and middle income countries to support countries, HIV tuberculosis and malaria in the 11 countries. We leverage countries which we had presented today, and Nigeria will receive $143M for Tuberculosis for the next 3 years,” Eliud Wanerdwalo, senior disease coordinator at the Global Fund at a roundtable meeting organized by the Stop TB Partnership that brings together Ministers of Health and dignitaries from 11 African countries.

The theme TB Response in the African Region: Unprecedented Actions for Unprecedented Times.

According to Wanerdwalo, we are very pleased to get our colleagues from the African Union to host this event for 11 African countries about their progress in scaling up their TB programs, but also the commitment to continue to support the programs, even in this challenging period of COVID- 19 and more importantly, to continue with commitment to fund the response in Africa.

Global Fund is the largest international funder of TB worldwide. We have been supporting malaria, tuberculosis and HIV programmes since 2002.

“In this session, we are collectively investing about 6 million US dollars over the next three years to fight Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV this present about 45% of our investment. So you can see how important these regions are to the Global fund,” he said.

Wanerdwalo further said that in TB will be reinvesting almost half a billion US dollars over the next three years to scale up programs in these 11 countries, but in addition to this, we will be providing about 7 million US dollar to support countries, scaling up their programs to find people who are missing from treatment.

“For us in the Global Fund, we believe, everyone who needs treatment should be found especially those who are in a difficult situation, those who are in a normal circumstance, and those who do not go to the facility. We should make all efforts to find them and put them on treatment, this will ensure that it will cut the chain of transmission of tuberculosis and the spread of the epidemic.

“We understand countries are facing unprecedented challenges in implementing this commitment this COVID period, but we would like to work with countries to ensure that they redouble their efforts, not only to recover the losses which they have experienced this year,” he said.

Also speaking, Suvanand Sahu, deputy executive director Stop TB Partnership Secretariat, Geneva , said the areas of investment is to improve the access in diagnosis and purchase of more diagnostic equipment and visit disease and also to improve access to data.

We are investing in communities to be able to undertake screening and diagnosing using community health care workers across. We know that close to over 60 percent of Primary Health Care seeking in Nigeria is through the private sector. And there will be a significant investment in improving the network of private health.