Set up health projects fund — Coalition

The Ghana Coalition of Non-Governmental Organisations in Health (GCNH) has advocated the establishment of a stability fund to finance vaccination and other health projects.

This is because the GAVI Alliance, a donor agency, will withdraw its support for vaccination projects in Ghana after 2020.

At a news conference organised in Accra yesterday,  the Chairman of the GCNH, Mr Gabriel Gbiel Benarkuu, said by the year 2020, GAVI would have withdrawn its support to Ghana because the country had attained a middle-income status. Mr Benarkuu said the GAVI Alliance had contributed about $90 million  to Ghana’s immunisation programme over the past 15 years.

Gavi is a public-private partnership which is focused on saving children’s lives and protecting people’s health by increasing access to immunisation in poor countries.

Difficulty

According to Mr Benarkuu, even with GAVI’s support, about 220,000 children in Ghana had not received the required immunisation due to certain difficulties in the supply chain procedure.

He said that was also the reason why it had become necessary for the government to establish a sustainable fund to finance the country’s immunisation programme in the years ahead, to prevent the deaths of children. 

“A vaccine sustainability fund will ensure that children across the country are immunised against preventable diseases like measles, polio, diphtheria and the rest,” Mr Bernarkuu stressed.

He appealed to civil society organisations, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health and other donor agencies to help secure funding for the country’s immunisation programme beyond 2020.

Responding to concerns about the potency of vaccines, the civil society organisations’ representative on the Vaccine Alliance Board of GAVI, Dr Joan Awunyo-Akaba, gave an assurance that the vaccines were genuine and also certified by accredited international bodies before they were administered.

“The World Health Organisation conducts regular checks on vaccines before they are sent to the various countries. Here in Ghana, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) conduct checks on the vaccines before they are distributed for immunisation,” she added.