Public Health Expenditure, Child Right Act and Child Health Outcomes: The Nigerian Experience

Abstract

This study focused on the Child Rights Act and how relevant stakeholders, institutions and agencies have been able to guarantee the attainment of these rights through budgetary provisions. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to determine the effects of public healthcare expenditure on the attainment of these rights. To this end, the study employed the Grossman human capital development model and fitted a time series data obtained from World Development Indicators and CBN statistical bulletin using OLS and TSLS. In the process, we observed that public healthcare expenditure has been on the increase, while the under-five mortality rate has been falling but not in the same proportion. Secondly, we observed that public healthcare expenditure is statistically significant with under-five mortality rate but with an infinitesimal magnitude of 0.017% (OLS) and 0.035% (TSLS). Public education expenditure is positively but has no statistically significant relationship with primary school enrolment. It was discovered that the incidence of mortality is higher than the child school enrolment. The findings also show that location and accessibility to both health and education facilities are important in explaining under-five mortality and primary school enrolment respectively. We therefore suggest that more proportion of the public healthcare expenditure should be allotted to the welfare of the under-five, thereby fulfilling the Child Rights Act.

Keywords: Public health expenditure, child right Act, Child Health outcomes