UNICEF, Kogi Partner To Reposition Health Sector

Kogi State government in partnership with UNICEF has facilitated a review of the 2023 Annual Operational Plan (AOP), for the state ministry of Health. 

This is aimed at repositioning the health sector in the state to deliver positive outcomes and change the narratives of negative indicators in the year 2024.

The commissioner of health, Dr. Usman Zakari who spoke with journalists in Abuja, underscored the importance of the exercise, saying, “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

She said, ‘We are reviewing the last annual operational plan and developing a new one. We are trying to look at the status of implementation of some of the things we said we were going to do in the last AOP. By the time we have done that and we have done the review, then we now look at how we are going to do business going forward.

“If you don’t have these plans on ground, you can actually meet targets without knowing it, and you may not even meet targets without knowing it,” the commissioner said.

One of the reasons why it is important to have a plan, he observed is to make decisive and deliberate efforts towards meeting them and to be strategic on all the items in the plan.

“If you noticed, almost the entire ministry of health is here. The reason why we didn’t allow them to do this around the office is other exigencies around the office will cause a lot of distractions. We have drastically reduced the level of activities in the ministry of Health and brought them here to Abuja so that we can all contribute to developing this all-important document which will show us strategic direction on how to move forward.

“There are several components of it. There is resource allocation: both human and financial resources. There are some health indicators – maternal mortality, under 5 mortality and all of those things,” he said.