Accra, June 24, GNA - Ghana needs the Abuja Target of 15 percent health budget plus some increase in donor funding to enable it to meet the MDGs health indicators, Mr Sylvester Anemana, Ministry of Health Chief Director has said.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency, he said, if government could increase health allocation from the current 11 percent to 15 percent, the country would need a little push from donor partners to achieve goals 4 and 5 of the MDGs especially.

The Abuja Target, which requires all African governments to allocate 15 percent of national budget to health care, was adopted nearly ten years ago in Abuja, Nigeria.

Mr Anemana made this known on Wednesday after he addressed a day's national conference on the state of the nation's health sector on the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) in Accra for stakeholders in the health sector to review pledges and commitments made for attaining the goals. The conference under the theme: "MDGs or Better Health: Promises or Commitments", was under the auspices of the Alliance for Reproductive Health Rights (ARHR). Mr Anemana said meeting the target of the MDGs was an expensive enterprise and indicated that many countries in Africa including Ghana were struggling to meet the Abuja target.

He said although Ghana had seen allocation increases in the sector, she was far away from the target as well as the 34 US dollars per capita expenditure recommended by the Commission on Macro Economics and Health. Transferring the cost of health to patients, Mr Anemana said, had been a tested option with mixed results. She therefore added that by December this year government would introduce an innovative premium system under the health insurance scheme aimed at removing existing financial barriers for the poor in accessing health care. This, he said, would further move Ghana towards the attainment of the goals by the 2015 deadline.

"We believe the MDGs are attainable. We also believe that actions leading to the attainment of the targets represent unique opportunities for building vibrant and sustainable health systems for our people," he said. At the level of implementation of the MDGs, Mr Anemana said, even though government believe it was on course to achieve goals 4 and 6 of the health related targets, the same could not be said about goal 5. "This for us is particularly worrying."

Mrs Vicky Okine, Executive Director of ARHR said sixteen years since the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), sexual and reproductive health status of women and children had not seen improvement in Ghana.

Quoting statistics to buttressed her point, she said, infant mortality decreased from 64/1000 life births in 2003 to 50/1000 life births in 2008, while maternal mortality remained high at 580/1000 life births in 2008. Mrs Okine expressed the worry that home-based deliveries remained significantly high at 43 percent putting the lives of many women of reproductive age at risk.

In addition, she said, rural urban disparity in health care provision remained uneven with 84 per cent of urban births were likely to be delivered at a health facility compared to only 43 per cent in rural area. 24 June 10