By Tobias Lengnan Dapam
The Senior Technical Adviser, Office of the Senior Special Adviser to the President (OSSAP) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Dr Bala Yusuf Yunusa has assured that Nigeria is on track to achieving SDGs goals by 2030.
He stated this on Tuesday in Abuja, during Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) engagement with SDG office on the updates of Health and Nutrition related SDG goals.
The official said the country is working assiduously on policies and programs to ensure that negative indicators are reversed and on track to meet the children and nutrition SDG3 before 2030.
At the meeting organised in collaboration with the Save the Children International (SCI) in Abuja, Bala said children and nutrition are related in the SDG3 and in some components of SDG2, adding that the Ministry of Health are implementing policies and programs to achieve these.
He said before 2030, all indicators will be on track, saying that the implementation is happening in the Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) as they all have a mandate for a particular SDGs.
While giving overview of Health and Nutrition SDGs implementation in Nigeria, the Office of the Special Assistant to the President of SDGs, Dr. Zakariya Mohammed said
health-related SDGs indicators and targets are justifiably broad comprising of the set of 13 targets in SDG3, as well as health elements/indicators and influence across many other SDGs.
“The SDGs promote social determinants of health such as nutrition (SDG 2), education (SDG 4), gender (SDG 5), WASH(SDG 6), employment (SDG 8), reducing inequalities (SDG 10), housing (SDG 11) and healthy environments (SDGs 13–15)”.
He said other Health-related indicators and targets are also present in some other SDGs including SDGs1,2,4,5,6,8,10 & 11.
He said the cognizants that the determinants of health and also most of the risk factors of disease conditions lie outside the health sector adding that Health is considered as determinant, enabler and outcome of the SDGs efforts and core to human capital development.
He further explained that targets of the Health Goal (SDG3), the SDG3 (13 targets)centered around the key health areas: Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH); infectious diseases including HIV.
