14 March 2008
Maputo — Mozambican Health Minister Ivo Garrido said in Maputo on Thursday that his sector did not receive in full the funds promised by foreign donors for the year 2007.
Addressing the opening session of a Meeting of the Biennial Health Sector Coordination Committee, Garrido said that the donors had promised to disburse 35 million US dollars during the first half of 2007, but only 10 million US dollars had been made available by the end of June.
As an example he said that one of the signatories of the common fund set up to support the Health Ministry had promised to grant 38.5 per cent of the Ministry's foreign funding but, because of unspecified conditions, this donor only disbursed the first instalment in the second fortnight of September, and the second instalment came on 28 December, and then only in part.
"Thus, funds to implement the one year plan were disbursed during the last quarter of the year", Garrido told the meeting.
At the end of the year "there were still about eight million dollars to be disbursed", said Garrido. "So we ended the year without having received all the finds that the cooperation partners promised for the health sector".
For his part, the chief of the European Commission delegation in Mozambique, Glauco Calzuola, lamented the late disbursement of the funds for the health sector programme, known as PROSAUDE.
"This aspect must be improved and the new memorandum of understanding as well as multi-year programming and budgeting will help", said Calzuola. The European Commission took charge as focal donor for Mozambique's health sector in November 2006. He said that since then, the health sector has only managed to use 68 per cent of its budget.
Drawing up a balance sheet of the sector's performance in 2007, both Garrido and Calzuola agreed that there was some progress, despite continuing difficulties, particularly related to financial issues.
Calzuola warned that the defects in the Health Ministry's financial management system must be overcome in order to ensure greater confidence among the donors.
"There are still inadequacies in financial management", he said, "but thanks to the joint efforts between the Ministry and its partners, there have been improvements in this area, as shown by the repeated assessments undertaken by (the international consultancy firm) Deloitte".
He added that the ministry "is aware of the need to strengthen capacity at all levels in order to strengthen the system and thus achieve the Millennium Development Goals".
The key health-related Millennium goals are to cut the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds and the maternal mortality rate by three-quarters between 1990 and 2015, and to halt, and then reverse, the spread of HIV/AIDS.
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