The President, Dangote Foundation, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has advised business owners to dedicate one per cent of their profits after tax to the health sector.
This is even as heads of government across Africa expressed support for a new health platform tagged ‘African Business Coalition for Health,’ a joint initiative of the Aliko Dangote Foundation, GBCHealth, and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, which was inaugurated in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia recently.
Dangote, who was represented by the Foundation’s Executive Director, Halima Aliko-Dangote, said Africa Business Health Forum would identify issues and solutions to Africa’s health challenges with a view to mobilising the will to confront it headlong.
He said, “Governments from both developed and developing countries are increasingly looking at public-private partnerships as a way to expand access to higher quality health services by leveraging capital, managerial capacity, and know-how from the private sector.”
He informed his audience that in keeping with his passion to see healthier African people and a better continent, he had proposed and charged business leaders in Nigeria to commit at least one per cent of their profit after tax to support the health sector.
In his own remark, the co-Chairman, GBCHealth, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, said while Africa had made significant progress in the funding of healthcare, “we are still very far from where we need to be to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 3.”
He lamented that healthcare in Africa was constrained by scarce public funding and limited donor support and that out-of-pocket expenditure accounted for 36 per cent of Africa’s total healthcare spending.
He pointed out that given the income levels in Africa, it was no surprise that healthcare spending in Africa was grossly inadequate to meet Africa’s needs, leading to a financing gap of N66bn per annum.
[Punch]
