Media charged to canvas for service delivery performance

The Nigerian media have been charged to support the process of ensuring positive change in service delivery performance by public institutions, particularly in the education and health sectors.
At a workshop in Abuja organised by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), the acting Director General of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Victor Adeyeye, a professor, urged the media to promote quality service delivery in primary education and basic health services in their reportage as that would draw attention of policy makers to set benchmark on service delivery performance in Nigeria and in Africa at large.
Adeyeye drew his charge from the report of research study, which was conducted by the World Bank in partnership with AERC and the African Development Bank Group (ADB). According to the findings, low productivity of workers rather than the availability of personnel or geographical structures are the factors responsible for poor service delivery in Nigeria’s education and health sectors.
The survey therefore, called for increased spending by the various levels of government to ensure improved services to address the identified issues.
At the two-day workshop with the media and civil society organisations, which was organised by AERC and the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Opeyemi Fadeyibi, Service Delivery Indicators Field Coordinator at the World Bank, said: “Low productivity of workers may be attributed to several causes including 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.”
The overall objective of the SDI project is to gauge the quality of service delivery in primary education and basic health services and to provide a set of robust measures for benchmarking service delivery performance in Africa. It is expected that this will enable the governments and citizens identify gaps and to track progress over time. It is envisaged that the 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.
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 in order 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.
The education survey was conducted in four states – Anambra, Ekiti, Niger and Bauchi – 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 percent absence rate as against 5.5 percent for private schools. Reasons for absence by the teachers included field trip (25.7 percent), illness (19.9percent), retrieving salary (10.2 percent) and maternity leave (9.2 percent).
In the area of teacher competence, only 36.8 percent of the surveyed teachers were found competent in Mathematics and another 46.3 percent in English Language, while a mere 15.3 percent 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 for each of the six geo-political zones. These are: Osun, Ekiti, Anambra, Imo, Bayelsa, Cross River, Kebbi, Kaduna, Bauchi, Taraba, Nasarawa and Kogi States. The Federal Ministry of Health assisted the World Bank to conduct the survey which focused on primary health care, secondary facilities, health care providers and end users of health care.
The study revealed that only 19.8 percent of the sample area professionals have the ability to manage maternal and newborn complication. Specifically, there were 33.2 percent medical doctors across the sample area, 23.9 percent nurses or midwifes, 13.6 percent community health workers and 12.4 percent other professionals.
For availability of drugs, health posts had 46.9 percent, 47.3 percent for health centres and 63 percent in the hospitals, while hospitals scored only 1.8 percent 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 stands at merely 34 percent of health facilities.
Obadia Miroro, assistant Knowledge manager at AERC, said that about 51 percent of health facilities had met the minimum medical equipment requirements, which included a thermometer, any weighing scale, sphygmomanometer, stethoscope for health posts, and additionally sterilising equipment and a refrigerator for health centres and hospitals. Health facilities, on average, had 49 percent of all essential drugs available at time of the survey.

Obadia Miroro, assistant knowledge manager at African Economic Research Consortium (AERC); Victor Adeyeye, acting director-general of the Nigeria Social and Economic Research Institute (NISER); Opeyemi Fadeyibi, Service Delivery Indicators Field coordinator at The World Bank; Wilson Wasike, manager Collaborative Research AERC; and Adebayo Ajala, Social and Governance Policy Research Department at NISER, at the media workshop.